TIME TRAVEL UNDER THE APPLE TREE

                  Last week it was sunny and hot, a rather rare meteorological event for Manchester, temperature reaching up to 29⁰C. After a hearty breakfast I pulled the reclining canvas chair under the apple tree, only shaded bit in the garden and put my legs up with the E-Book and a glass of lightly sweetened lemon water with plenty of ice cubes. I decided to reread the book “Catchers in the Rye”.

I could not read more than a couple of pages. The blue sky with a few Santaclausian beard-white clouds, moving in slow motion seemed much more fascinating. Looking at the sky through the green leaves of the apple tree just took me years back when we were children. Who said time travel is only hypothetical?

As was the norm in those days we always spent our summer vacation, most of it if not all, in our ancestral village,. Being part of an extended family, there were many children. In the mid day all the adults would be taking siesta after a good lunch. Younger ones, the babies and the toddlers would be doing the same with their mothers or grandmothers.

We, the older ones always managed to escape and spend time outside, mostly unsupervised. The heat waves of midsummer could not dampen our spirits. We passed most of the time in the garden behind our house. The shady area under the large Neem tree was the most sought after place when the sun was really intense. There were always a couple of bamboo bedsteads kept there and I often lay there with a story book or a children’s magazine. We were very fortunate that there were lots of books and magazines in our house, almost a mini library. 

We often used to play a game: trying to dissolve the small cloud patches by staring at them. We felt very powerful that we could make the clouds vanish or at least change their shapes at our command. Little did we know that it had nothing to do with us! Ah, the pleasures of ignorance!

These memories appeared so vivid, real and three dimensional. I could see myself in a white sando ganji (sleeveless cotton t-shirt), and a khaki half pant, the ganji little damp with sweat. I could touch the dried fallen Neem leaves on the dusty ground underneath and hear the excited voice of my younger cousin.

It feels like a true recollection of past but I know, it rarely is. The past is what

our episodic memory bits choose to reconstruct and bring the composite scenario to our conscious mind. We cannot remember each and every detail that happened at that moment in past but the brain reconstructs a very convincing, plausible story, filling the gaps with imagined or trans-located bits.It may be flawed but this unique human ability to reconstruct the past in all dimensions is absolutely essential to imagine different scenarios which our mind does all the time to keep us prepared for any future eventuality or even to enjoy a novel like “Catchers in the Rye”. 

Ref: E. Tulving, “Episodic Memory: From Mind to Brain”, Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 53, pp. 1-25, 2002