Memory as a camera

It’s a peaceful evening on Palolem beach: a cool breeze is blowing, the tourists– bronze, lobster red, pale ivory - are lazing about in the sand, watching the sky and the sea.

And then, as the sun starts to sink, there is a sudden spurt of activity. The sun worshippers rise and throng the shore’s edge, whipping out cameras, clicking furiously.

The sun sets. Slowly the sky changes colour, the sea transforms. Everything grows a little darker and moodier and quieter. The sun worshippers become stick figures, black against the still bright sky now streaked with pink.

Please take a picture of me – a woman in a sarong says, thrusting her camera at a stranger and posing against the sea and the evening sky. She unties her hair and shakes it over her face. She spreads her arms wide. She strikes a pose. She smiles.

The camera captures the moment, as I look on in bemusement.

She shows the picture to me in her excitement. Look, you can see the sky – she says, pointing.

I look at the picture in her itsy bitsy, 4 x 2-inch camera. I look at the real sky. That anyone would even attempt to capture and condense on a teeny-weeny camera the colours of this sunset, the gloriousness of the endlessly beautiful sky, seems more than just laughable, it’s like a trivialization, an affront almost to the mystery of beauty. And before I can stop myself, I tell her: You can’t really capture it, you know.

I know, the woman says regretfully. But always I try.

Only foreign tourists (rarely Indian) regard sunsets with such worshipful reverence, only they take so many photographs of it. Maybe in their own, colder, countries they rarely see the sun setting over the sea, or perhaps the colours are never so vivid. But surely memory is a better camera, capturing not just the visual element but the entire experience of it? No camera can see what the roving eye in seconds captures: the hills already grown dark at one edge, how the sea darkens on this side while remaining bright where the sun has set, the colours that change every moment. But then, once you return home, how do you share with a friend a memory of a sunset on Palolem beach? A visual suggestion is all you can offer, a literal reproduction without the magic of the original, which remains embedded somewhere in memory, somewhere in the heart.