Episodic memory is a category of long-term memory that involves the recollection of specific events, situations, and experiences. Since every individual views and understands circumstances differently and because every person has different memories of those events, episodic memory is vital to your sense of self. In a person with Alzheimer’s, there is a decline in the ability to retrieve this kind of memory. Doshi portrays this relationship between episodic memory and identity—

“On the day she forgot the name of the street that she lived in for two decades, Ma called me to say she had bought a pack of razors and wouldn’t be afraid to use them if circumstances deteriorate further. Then she started to cry” (3). 

In the aftermath of the incident, Antara, the daughter, recollects how her mother “was a woman who could memorise recipes she had only read once” and how “she could recall variations of tea made in other people’s homes” and “when she cooked, she reached out for bottles and masalas without glancing up” (3). The mother’s agony of losing her identity is evident in how she says she’d rather kill herself than live a life where she no longer remembers who she was or where she lived. 

In an attempt to make the mother remember her past, Antara engages in a range of activities, including “writing stories from her past on little scraps of paper and tucking them in corners around her flat”(2). The most fascinating, however, is the way she uses objects as mediums to trigger some memories and erase some others. Habermas and Paha (2002: 3) define ‘personal objects’ as cherished favourite things that an individual is attached to, including souvenirs, gifts, and subjectively valued utilitarian objects. Examining such personal objects in the context of Alzheimer’s could show how some items of material culture, often everyday utilitarian things or objects with emotional value attached to them, can precipitate memories of home, loved ones and the past.

The theoretical framework “Material Engagement Theory” developed by Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew argues that the mind, body and culture conflate and that objects mediate human behaviour, cognition, and sociality. Although grounded in the anthropological archaeology of the mind, this theoretical framework can be used to understand the interaction between cognition and material culture and analyse how materiality becomes entangled with our lived experience and thinking. Doshi demonstrates how the intergenerational transfer of objects has the potential to influence and retrieve personal memories. 

Of all the novel characters, Antara understands the value of objects. It is what drove her to become an artist in the first place. As a young woman, she began collecting objects like tungsten bulbs, batteries, cords, pens, stamps and coins that the deceased inhabitants left behind in the bungalow that her grandparents lived in—

” I began by looking up the dates and designs of these objects, losing myself in encyclopaedias of energy and patents in the library, always ending up far from the place where I began. To avoid these tangents, I started to draw the objects myself, mapping them out as I saw them, copying as closely as I could” (30).

Furthermore, she has her collection of objects that are reminders of her past— 

“glass bottles that read Thumps Up and Gold Spot for when these brands no longer exist, but also antique tongue cleaners, and pastel autograph books that I asked strangers on the street to sign when I was a child.” (31).

Photographs serve as one of the primary mediums of remembrance throughout the novel—photographs of Tara, Nani, and the man whom both mother and daughter loved.  

In an instance, Antara describes photographs of her mother as a young girl, wearing white. And of photographs that her Nani keeps hidden away—

“ where Ma is about eighteen. Her hair is shorter and manageable, and she wears blue eye shadow and pink lipstick. Her blouse is silk, printed with some hybrid tropical bird and tucked into high-waist jeans. Shoulder pads come up to her ear lobes.” (45)

— which she has decided to show Tara to “make her remember. ” 

Antara also narrates how she accidentally starts a project that eventually becomes a show at a small gallery in Bombay. She drew a man’s face from a picture she found and then lost the original photograph. When she couldn’t find the original, she proceeded to draw the face again from her drawing, copying her work as faithfully as she could. This eventually became a daily practice. When she was invited to show the artwork series in the gallery, she thought her work “celebrated human fallibility.”  The turn of events is when the mother visits the gallery. She walked through every room and stood in front of all 365 faces. She called it her game of “Chinese whispers.” However, a week later, when Antara returned to Pune, her mother came at her with a rolling pin and accused her of being a traitor and liar. Later that day, Antara was asked to move out — “..and did not see me again until I came one afternoon with Dilip by my side to tell her I was engaged.” (34). Later in the text, we learn that the man in the photograph was Reza Pine, a photojournalist that her mother loved in the past.

Just as much as Tara uses objects to trigger memories, she also uses them to erase memories. Early in the text, we see Antara taking part in the exercise of erasure of her partner’s memories by removing objects that served as physical reminders of the past—

“I made changes cautiously, first removing any bed sheet or towel that other women could have used. Then books or items of clothing that they might have gifted him….I slowly purged any remnant of their existence: old photographs, letters, mugs, pens collected from hotel rooms, t-shirts with the names of cities they’d travelled to together, magnets in the shape of monuments, leaves preserved in paper, collections of pale shells in a jar from beach holidays.” (26). 

Another instance in the novel that portrays the entanglements of objects with memories is when Antara’s narrator voice recounts her grandparent’s house. She says that they purchased the house on Boat Club road twenty years ago from an aged Parsi spinster—

“My grandparents arrived with their old furniture: my grandmother’s chairs made from Multani wood, and large Godrej cupboards, as secure as tombs.” and “old light bulbs no longer usable, unpolished silver ornaments, porcelain tea sets in their original boxes”(39).

Malfouris (2019) argues that “minds are not confined within individual brains, bodies or any other isolated locale. Rather, we should see the ‘mental world’ as inherent in the relations and transformations that allow human beings to reach out and to engage their surrounding environments.” This explains the possible reasons for Doshi’s characters to move out of their house at Boat Club road later—they believed that traumatic memories had etched themselves to not just objects but to their old house itself;“ their old flat was inhabited by apparitions of my grandfather’s affairs and Nani’s many stillborn children.” (38). Materiality is essential because it encompasses more than just physical matter. It alludes to the fundamental entwining of matter and thought. Therefore, understanding the relationship between memory, identity, and objects on a more complex and varied level may offer new insights into how it might be utilised to recover memories in cases of Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of human memory loss. 

References:

• Cherry, Kendra (2022) What is Episodic Memory? Very Well Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-episodic-memory-2795173
• Doshi, Avni (2019). The Girl in White Cotton. Fourth Estate-Harper Collins Publishers
• Habermas, Tilmann & Paha, Christine. (2002). Souvenirs and other personal objects: Reminding of past events and significant others in the transition to university. New York: Springer
• Malafouris L. (2019). Mind and material engagement. Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, 18(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9606-7
• Marschall, Sabine. (2019). ‘Memory objects’: Material objects and memories of home in the context of intra-African mobility. Journal of Material Culture. 24. 135918351983263. 10.1177/1359183519832630. 
• Sommerfeld, Katy (n.d) Why do we associate memories with objects? Legacy Box. 
  https://legacybox.com/blogs/analog/why-do-we-associate-memories-with-objects