Of bottling memories in flower and paint

...and the quest to find more and new ways to remember

A flower memory journal entry I created after months from the flowers I had collected and preserved from walks and outings beforehand

Dear readers,

When I was around thirteen or fourteen years old, I read Daphne du Maurier’s novel, ‘Rebecca’ for the first time and it still remains one of my favourite books till date. As it often happens with the books you read in your formative years, certain lines take up space in your head, forever to linger there. Here is one such quote from the book.

‘If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.’

Over the years, it strikes me that bottling up beautiful memories has been something I have striven to do all through my life. If it was performed unconsciously for the most part, it is now a conscious, dedicated endeavour in recent years, where I preserve, document, and prize those memories, unbottling them when I most need to on days when one feels hopeless, stuck, or wondering if the light will ever return again to illumine the dusty, dim corners.

I have journaled memories in diaries I have kept since I was eight years old, meticulously documented the day’s minutiae in yearly planners, including moments which gave me joy (a special experience, a loving message from a friend or loved one, or an accomplishment I was proud of), and in the last decade, especially once I got a smart phone, through photography. I believed the act of documenting something by hand - whether it be writing it down or taking a photograph - would pin the otherwise fugitive, nebulous memory to my head, almost like preserving butterflies. And so, whenever I revisit old planners or the gallery of thousands of photographs I have accumulated over the years, I can almost pinpoint what or how I was feeling at that moment. But the truth is also this: no matter how many paths you take to ensuring that you remember, to resist the act of forgetting and the memories vanishing into into either, you still invariably forget. I guess then the quest becomes of being even more mindful about reinventing ways to remember.

A collage of flower memories I created as part of my pregnancy journey

Several months after I was well into my pregnancy in early 2023, those exhausting first and early second trimester days having gone by in an amorphous cloud of debilitating anxiety, nausea, and fatigue, I found myself wishing to document my pregnancy in some way. It took me a long time to actually accept that I was pregnant, rather, I wasn’t in the capacity to do so earlier and I now wanted to create memories of what it felt like to be so for the future. I even had fanciful notions of my future child encountering the journal entries one day! I had been exploring the relationship between dried and fresh flowers and art for a while now, whether it be dry pastels, watercolours, or watercolour pencils and pens and I found myself turning to them once more, this time in the form of a pregnancy journal. Given that I always shared my art on social media, I wrote little cryptic captions, explicable only to myself as I had shared about my pregnancy with very few people; I wrote longer, more detailed entries in the journal itself. Looking back on these notes and the entries, I can conjure up a little of what I was feeling that day: the exhaustion, the wariness at what lay ahead, the incredible, fantastical journey of creation occurring within me and which I could not quite believe that I too was participating in.

A painted memory of a July walk in Cubbon Park, featuring the pressed remains of a once butter yellow plumeria, nutmeg-scented Akashmallige, and mauve petals of bauhinia flowers

Before the baby was born, I had grand plans of creating a separate mother’s journal where I imagined I would bottle up all the precious memories, moments, and vignettes, every little essence of this journey of motherhood. I imagined myself writing detailed journal entries about the storm of emotions swirling inside me; I thought of preserving special milestones out in some way or the other. I find myself alternately amused and incredulous at my extreme naivety in thinking I would have the time and mindspace to so ambitiously preserve those moments. Of course, some mothers are able to do so in their own ways but as for me, I could just about remember to hurriedly take photos and videos in those early days when I was literally steeped in postpartum fog (aside: if you honestly ask me about those days now, I can tell you they just…passed by. I look at photographs of my daughter from the first six months of her life and simply see the photograph for what it is: her at a specific stage of her life, the photographer ie me an invisible, almost irrelevant creature. So much for my belief that I could pinpoint what I was feeling seeing a photo no matter how much time had passed;)

It wasn’t just about documenting the journey though; I also missed making art. While I was gradually returning to my writing in spurts, I wasn’t able to find the time to think about and make art. Several years ago, I had begun making art because I found myself wishing to once more listen to and nourish my inner child, painting being an activity which I had greatly enjoyed as a child - and also, because it was the only kind of meditation that worked for me. The act of swirling the brush around in a bowl of water and dipping the brush in watercolour cakes would give much needed pause to the endless, relentless treadmill of my thoughts, the process of painting becoming a gift and respite from those very thoughts threatening to overwhelm me. It is why the journey of making art was what essentially mattered to me as opposed to the outcome - and it is the reason why I have been continuing to make art for all these years even if the results are uniformly uneven at times.

Some poems are meant to be incomplete; in their incompleteness lies their possible greatness

Unlike writing, which I did so on laptop or phone, having given up writing by hand many years ago, I had to actually sit on my desk to physically create art - and my desk was always and invariably cluttered, a fitting metaphor for my default state of mind. My desk in many ways is a little, intimate shrine to all the things that I love and hold dear: bowls and colourful woven baskets stuffed with ephemera, zines made by friend, V or the ones she has gifted to me, paintings propped up against the wall and the postcards floating above it, a plate iced with pebbles, shells, and stones, and flower petals in a cloth sack which my friend, L gifted to me. Interestingly, I write very little at my desk; I have primarily used it to make my art and whenever I sit at it, facing my watercolors and journal and flowers, I feel the way an artist or a scientist must do so in their studio or laboratory, insulated from all and simply focused upon their task and calling at hand.

I had missed being away from my desk and one day, I simply sat at it again, pruning the clutter away until all that remained was actual desk space. I opened one of my art journals and contemplated its stiff white pages, seeing in them now a flower memory journal, to remind myself of this unique chapter of my life which would never return again. The flowers I chose to press and arrange upon the paper, the pigments I chose to marry with water, and the little art poems that I chose to accompany each artwork were reflective of the person I was at this moment and the life I was leading. Through this constellation of elements, I was choosing to remember what I wanted to remember in this delirious chapter of life called new parenthood where everything and nothing made sense: of evenings spent in temples and shopping for flowers in markets of Malleshwaram, of lakeside and park walks, coffee runs and hastily, chaotically consumed meals, and domestic mundanity that so very easily falls by the way and yet is so extraordinary in its singular simplicity.

Champak yellow is my favorite kind of yellow. A butter-soft flurry of colors reposing on paper. An offering of sunlight and dusk from kind hands. The fragrance is a memory of an evening amid flowers and flying coconuts and disco bananas and momos eaten under a giant peepal tree.

I am also at a stage in my life where I am constantly and almost obsessively questioning my creative purpose: what am I doing and why? Where is my journey leading me to and is it in and towards direction and destination I would like it to be? Am I resisting doing what I am actually meant to be doing? I have asked these questions previously at various stages of my life and yet, each time I ask them, they need to be as urgently answered and understood as during those earlier instances. As I try to find the answers once more, I find that working on these flower memory pieces are a way of anchoring myself. As I arrange the flowers upon the paper, sometimes fresh, sometimes pressed days ago, their fragrances drifting my way in one way or the other, as I anoint the paper with paint, I tell myself that even these pieces are in some way taking me to the journey I am meant to be on. And in that moment, that’s all that matters.

I shall end here for now, readers but not without asking if you too bottle memories? And if yours, how do you do so? And perhaps, equally interesting, if you don’t believe in bottling memories, why so? I would love to hear from you either way.

Till next time,

Much love,

Priyanka

**

End notes:

I wrote about making the therapeutic effect of making flower art for J’aipur journal few years ago

I wrote about how scrapbooking and collaging helps me write better