“Don’t write a memoir till you’re 70!” exclaimed Leila Seth. “By then, you’re not quite bothered if someone doesn’t think well of you. It’s easier to tell the truth,” she added, with that cheeky twinkle in her eye. At ‘Our Plural Selves: Writing Memoirs’, a session with Chief Justice Leila, Carnatic musician T.M. Krishna and author Irwin Allan Sealy, moderated by publisher V.K. Karthika, the word ‘memoir’ often switched places with ‘memory’. And with the idea of “retrieving, rewriting and reimagining memory”, arose the question of absolute and subjective truth. “To speak the truth is the first requirement of a memoir,” said Allan. “It’s also the first casualty of it.” Allan’s The Small Wild Goose Pagoda , in its plotline, tracks the building of a pagoda above his terrace, with three men — a mistry, a mazdoor and a malik — but tells the deeper story of his decades-long association with, and mentorship of sorts, under them, intertwining his family’s history with their lives.
Vastly different in structure, and more typically a memoir, Leila’s Seth’s autobiography On Balance , looks chronologically at life from her days as a teenager in British India, to balancing a 55-year-long public career and family, in times when women rarely worked. “Only in writing as much about the pain as well as the joys of life, is there purpose in a memoir,” said Leila. “The very act of thinking back has often been a healing experience.” Leila acknowledged, though, that memory does filter fact. “When you look back, the truth may not really be the truth as it was; it’s the truth as you see it now.”
For Krishna, writing A Southern Music was about questioning the ‘truths’ that he had inherited as a student, and revisiting them with new eyes at various points on his learning curve. “In that sense, this is a memoir of ideas,” said Krishna. A collection of 28 essays, partitioned into experience, context and history of Carnatic music, Krishna’s story centres around his deeply personal “experience of the artistic moment”. It is also in choosing these “axis points” of telling one’s story, that the memoir defines itself, observed Karthika.
Allan, who structured his book as an almanac, couldn’t agree more: “Form, to me, isn’t the stepbrother of content. It’s the receptacle into which I can pour my thoughts, and it radically alters my consciousness of them. Once you’ve chosen your form, you’re constrained, yet at once, liberated,” he concluded.
