What Were We Before We Were We

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

- Ocean Vuong

Shahnaz, Ratnagiri

In Shahnaz's memory there are many holes, but she has stitched parts of her life together to form a narrative. It is the story of a woman's resistance against forgetting. Once, she had surrendered to the foggy landscape that allowed an escape into oblivion. No sorrow. No pain. Just listless wandering. Like many others here. That is why they look out for each other. Abandonment can be a strong bond. But then, it all came back. She found herself in an ashram and asked to be released. They refused, so she jumped over a ditch and ran away. She found her way back to her four children in Mumbai who had been living a hard life. She fought for them. Now they are studying and one day, they plan to live together.

“Call my son. Call my daughter. They will speak with you,” she says. She remembers their numbers by heart. That is the memory of love, even for those whose tethers to reality are perhaps too frayed to be fully repaired. But in their brokenness there is that resistance to the Sisyphean myth.

Sisyphus must be happy. Otherwise such endurance can be a lonely, loopy journey. She came to The Banyan in 2022.

“My name is Shahnaz and I am from a small village in Karnataka. I lived with my parents, sisters and a brother, in a small house in my village. I was married off and moved to a small house in Goregaon, Mumbai. I loved my husband, Aslam. My mother-in-law troubled me a lot. With four very young children and my husband, I moved out. Then my husband died and it was a huge shock for me. My children ate rice with water and sugar. In those circumstances, in shock, I lost my memory.