Repeat What You Know
Shikha Valsalan
On a street in a town slowly forgetting itself, people with name tags pinned to their clothes hurry to places they can no longer remember. Government vehicles zip past them, blaring announcements: “If lost or disoriented, stay still and call the memory helpline.”
“What is the memory helpline?” a man in a red shirt asks the vehicle, but he is ignored, and he immediately forgets the question he just asked.
On that same street, Maya stands in front of a yellow door that must have once been white, waiting a full ten minutes before knocking. She wipes her sunglasses with the hem of her kurta, glancing at the bright pink bougainvillea spilling down either side of the house. The sun’s lines across the door and the flowers are sure and bright. Outside the lines, the whole world feels smudgy.
She has come for answers. Or maybe just to leave her question here, in the warmth of the sun—before it too vanishes along with everything she and everyone else has begun to forget.
Arun works inside that house with the yellow door, in the small room upstairs that used to be his, many years ago. Posters from his teenage years still cling to the walls, yellowing at the edges. The bed is just wide enough for him to stretch out. He leans against a pillow, laptop balanced on his legs, typing a reply: We can’t lose another developer. He’s the only one who remembers the old logic... He pauses mid-sentence, fingers hovering for a moment.
“Is there milk at home?” he asks himself. He looks at the grocery receipts taped to the wall. He finds one dated today with milk listed on it. His system includes personal notebooks, receipts on walls, and sticky notes. Arun continues to type. He holds on to the sounds of the keyboard, pressing each key harder than needed.
Behind the sound of the keys, he can hear the news from downstairs. A constant and steady group of voices, animated and consistent in its aim to lure the viewer. He doesn’t catch the full sentences, but fragments slip through: clusters of lost memories…carry your ID and notebooks...Kochi on alert...
Arun’s father, a thin, delicate man in his eighties, sits less than five feet from the ancient TV, mesmerized by the endless tickers on the sides and the bottom of the screen, and the news anchors who seem to speak only to him. He sits in his armchair every day, frowning at the same headlines as if seeing them for the first time. The same news story plays twice in the same hour. No one at the channel seems to notice anymore. Next to him on a table: a cellphone, a steel cup of water, and an old newspaper that he likes to touch once in a while.
A soft knock on the door, heard by neither son nor father. A second, firmer knock breaks through the steady noise of Arun’s keyboard and his father’s news, and they both stop.
Arun walks down the stairs with his laptop, counting each deliberate step in his mind as if he had all the time in the world. He opens the door.
Maya stands at the door, her eyes scanning Arun’s face with a light smile on her lips. Arun can’t quite place her face or her smile.
His father walks to the door and stands next to him, glancing back at the TV as if asking permission to the news reporters to take his eyes off them. For a moment, the voices seemed to pause mid-sentence, waiting for him to return.
“Did you ever get off the waiting list that day?” Maya asks Arun. Her face is as calm as if she were asking the time.
“What?” Arun asks.
“That day in November 2004, when we were supposed to talk,” she says, her brow creasing. “Didn’t you tell me that you didn’t get a train ticket…that you were on the waiting list?"
“Maya?” Arun asks. Maya, older, a little worn around the eyes. He grips the door tighter, feeling a warmth and hollow ache all at once. A gap where memories of this person he once knew should be. She looks at him steadily, her face calm, almost expectant. He thinks he should say something. An apology, or a welcome, or even her name again, but the words slip away.
That morning when Arun drove to the store for cigarettes, he saw a woman in a baby-pink dress walking on the pavement. Unhurried, as if she belonged to a different world or time. The regular early morning walkers were all hustling for space on that strip of concrete, but she claimed her own space. Her hair was loose, her eyes far away, as if she had been plucked from someone else's memory and spliced like film into that moment. He didn’t know why he thought of her now, but the image had stuck and he felt a strange sense of unease at the sight. The day before he had seen a kid pushing an empty grocery cart to school. And the other day his neighbor told him the postman was leaving all mail at the third house on the street; the one where no one lived. Little rips in the pattern of things, small and growing.
Arun feels the same unease seeing Maya here, at the door of his childhood home. Did he not get off the waiting list? Which waiting list? He is not able to remember. Maybe he had. The ping of his laptop cuts through the haze, pulling him back to the present, but he doesn't look away from her.
Arun scratches at the gray stubble on his chin, a small habit he’s picked up whenever he’s trying to remember something.
“Hello, my dear. It is very nice to meet you. My name is Mohan. Why don’t you come inside?” Arun’s father says to Maya, and walks back to his chair. He gestures to an empty spot, where another armchair used to be, seemingly unaware of its absence.
The news resumes, the tickers move again, the reporters are relieved that they are still relevant, and they go at it with renewed vigor. They recite the day’s tragedies with practiced ease, eyes wide and unblinking.
“You are watching Fresh News. Let me remind you of today’s headlines, in case you had to step away. Five people were shot dead at a crowded restaurant in Miami. An Indian Member of Parliament was injured after his colleague threw a heavy book at him. The World Health Organization expresses concerns about new findings related to the memory loss pandemic. Now for a short commercial break. Stay tuned for all the details and more.”
Arun places his laptop on the dining table in the kitchen and pulls two chairs close to the TV. His hand pauses on a stack of freshly ironed shirts. He doesn’t move them. He just stands there, giving himself a moment to think, and to remember the answer to Maya’s question. With his back to Maya, he pulls out his notebook and looks for her name. Nothing. He knows her but he had let her memories slip away in the chaos of the initial days of the pandemic. There was only so much one could hold on to. It has become a cause of friction in the new world. Having to tell people that they have been forgotten. But how could he say that to the woman he was once married to?
Maya sits on one of the chairs and places her bag on the floor, between her legs. She is sweating through her light cotton kurta, dark green patches spreading under her arms. Arun notices. It tugs at something in his memory. How she used to say, “I sweat when I’m anxious,” and how he had told her he liked her scent. She wipes her palms on her thighs and shifts slightly in her seat.
“How have you been?” Arun starts with a safe question, like this is simply a meeting between old friends, not two people sifting through a fog of lost memories.
“How have I been in which year?” Maya replies.
“I mean…all these years. Since…the last time we saw each other.”
“I’ve been okay. Apparently, I’m one of those cases where the virus is working at a faster rate than normal. I stayed with Deepa for a while,” Maya says. “My sister,” she adds.
Arun nods.
A beat. Maya looks into Arun’s eyes.
“Did you get those memory vitamins, Arun?” Mohan asks. “For you, not for me. They said on the news that people over eighty don’t need them.”
He turns to Maya. “Do you have kids?”
“No.”
“How about a husband?”
Arun stands, and hovers awkwardly next to his chair, unsure what to do with his hands.
“Do you want something to eat? Payasam?” he asks.
“No,” Maya says, folding her hands in her lap.
“I want a glass of lime juice," Mohan says.
“I don’t have a husband,” Maya says, looking at Mohan. And then to Arun, “I’ll also have lime juice.”
Arun turns back to Maya, his voice low. “You never got married?”
“That one time was enough,” Maya replies, her gaze lingering on the empty space where another armchair used to be.
“But…that was such a short...”
Maya leans forward, her voice almost clinical. “Did you ever say it, Arun? That you wanted out? In very clear words?”
Arun sits back in the chair, his back bent because of years of bad posture, hours on his laptop, carrying his child on his shoulders when she was small, and memories that he wouldn’t mind forgetting.
“Does it even matter anymore, Maya? It’s been so many years. “
“You know how they’ve been asking us to let go of trivial memories so there’s more space for the important ones? I didn't feel like letting go of this one. I just want to know if it ended for nothing.”
He sighs deeply. One thing worse than telling people they were forgotten is telling them that they were not as important to him as he was to them.
“I was really on the waiting list, Maya,” Arun says. “I saw your reminder and I still forgot. And then I thought I won’t make it anyway, so I made other plans at work. Some deadlines, I can’t remember now. You know how it was back then. We were all young, trying to please our bosses, get promoted, make more money...” Arun sets his laptop down on the floor, as if afraid it might slip from his hands. Hoping his story came more from memory than a fiction his guilty brain cooked up for him.
Maya looks at him for a moment, brow creasing. “So, we didn’t meet on the train that day?” she asks.
Arun opens his mouth to reply but the words falter. Did he clear the waiting list and forget about it? Did they meet on the train? He doesn’t know.
“One time, I missed the train from New Delhi to Ahmedabad,” Mohan’s voice cuts through. “That day the train derailed. So many people died,” He takes a sip of the water in the steel cup next to his chair. “Can you add a little more sugar to the lime juice, Arun?” Mohan asks, a few beads of water holding on to the sparse silvery stubble above his lips.
“New theory says that consuming oil can kill brain cells…” the TV drones on.
“No, we didn’t meet, Maya. I’m sure of it,” Arun says, his voice catching. “And then…and then after your trip, you said you didn’t want to see me again. You wanted a divorce.”
He shakes his head. “You don’t remember any of that, but you remember my parents’ address and just show up here after all these years.” He tries to play a reel of images, tightly wound and buried in his mind. But it unspools in all directions, giving him no clues about the order of events in his life. He begins to worry if it was him who said the last word between them.
Maya shifts in her seat. Her voice is quiet but firm.
“You forgot things too, even before all this,” she says. “You forgot to get sugar from the store once, and we drank bitter tea for days. Your friends joked that I didn’t know how to make tea.”
Arun looks at the curve of Maya’s cheek and the slight tremor between her eyebrows. Her open palms resting on her lap. Something in him stirs—he had loved her long ago.
“Do you remember that apartment where we stayed after the wedding? We were there for what, three months?” Arun asks.
“Yes. The one that was a long drive from your office…Do you remember that big brown shelf of drawers the previous owners had left behind? The one that I was so curious about?” Maya asks.
“Yes, you were obsessed with it,” Arun says with a smile.
“Yes. I asked myself and the shelf every day—why had they left it behind? What could be buried in it? Until one day while you were at work, I pulled out the bottom drawer. There was a little model airplane inside, sitting on top of old home decor magazines, cups with no saucers, spoons, souvenirs; things that people leave behind when they think they’ll come back. I kept staring at it, like it was asking me if I would take care of it. Or if I would forget too...”
Maya shifts her gaze from Arun’s face to her hands and then to Mohan’s TV.
“Do you want to watch an old Hindi movie? I like to watch the same movies again and again. I forget the stories of the new movies as soon as I am done watching them. What is your favorite movie?” Mohan asks Maya.
Maya puts her hand into her tote bag, and after a few seconds of rummaging, pulls out a small black notebook with Things to remember in cursive gold letters on the cover. She hands it to Arun without taking her eyes off the TV, which shows animated brain cells exploding in bright colors. Mohan and Maya’s eyes are glazed and their mouths parted slightly.
The book opens at a dog-eared page dated two days ago. A list of things to do, some crossed out and most left untouched. Arun flips through the pages filled with names, addresses, phone numbers and reminders.
He returns to the most recent page. His name. His parents’ address. In two different handwritings. Hers, and then his own.
He had written it. For her. Three days ago.
She had already come to him. He had already forgotten. A faint nausea rises like a diver surfacing too fast, memory forming in painful bubbles. Each one popping before he can grasp it.
“Did you ever get off the waiting list that day?” Maya asks.
She tilts her face the same way she did when she asked it the first time. But something has shifted, as if the words taste familiar in her mouth. She looks tired.
Arun blinks. He is sure she asked him that already. Or maybe he imagined it. Or maybe it was someone else. For a split second he wonders if he is still at the door, about to let her in.
“What?” he asks.
Maya takes the notebook from him and slips it into her bag.
For a moment, Arun imagines the brown shelf again. The one they had left behind.
That bottom drawer. He wonders if the airplane is still there. And if anyone is taking care of it.
Maya walks out of the house.
The anchor’s voice cuts in again.
“Let me remind you: if you feel like you’ve been here before, you probably have. Stay calm. Repeat what you know.”
Arun watches her go.
Not the first time.
“What is the memory helpline?” a man in a red shirt asks the vehicle, but he is ignored, and he immediately forgets the question he just asked.
On that same street, Maya stands in front of a yellow door that must have once been white, waiting a full ten minutes before knocking. She wipes her sunglasses with the hem of her kurta, glancing at the bright pink bougainvillea spilling down either side of the house. The sun’s lines across the door and the flowers are sure and bright. Outside the lines, the whole world feels smudgy.
She has come for answers. Or maybe just to leave her question here, in the warmth of the sun—before it too vanishes along with everything she and everyone else has begun to forget.
Arun works inside that house with the yellow door, in the small room upstairs that used to be his, many years ago. Posters from his teenage years still cling to the walls, yellowing at the edges. The bed is just wide enough for him to stretch out. He leans against a pillow, laptop balanced on his legs, typing a reply: We can’t lose another developer. He’s the only one who remembers the old logic... He pauses mid-sentence, fingers hovering for a moment.
“Is there milk at home?” he asks himself. He looks at the grocery receipts taped to the wall. He finds one dated today with milk listed on it. His system includes personal notebooks, receipts on walls, and sticky notes. Arun continues to type. He holds on to the sounds of the keyboard, pressing each key harder than needed.
Behind the sound of the keys, he can hear the news from downstairs. A constant and steady group of voices, animated and consistent in its aim to lure the viewer. He doesn’t catch the full sentences, but fragments slip through: clusters of lost memories…carry your ID and notebooks...Kochi on alert...
Arun’s father, a thin, delicate man in his eighties, sits less than five feet from the ancient TV, mesmerized by the endless tickers on the sides and the bottom of the screen, and the news anchors who seem to speak only to him. He sits in his armchair every day, frowning at the same headlines as if seeing them for the first time. The same news story plays twice in the same hour. No one at the channel seems to notice anymore. Next to him on a table: a cellphone, a steel cup of water, and an old newspaper that he likes to touch once in a while.
A soft knock on the door, heard by neither son nor father. A second, firmer knock breaks through the steady noise of Arun’s keyboard and his father’s news, and they both stop.
Arun walks down the stairs with his laptop, counting each deliberate step in his mind as if he had all the time in the world. He opens the door.
Maya stands at the door, her eyes scanning Arun’s face with a light smile on her lips. Arun can’t quite place her face or her smile.
His father walks to the door and stands next to him, glancing back at the TV as if asking permission to the news reporters to take his eyes off them. For a moment, the voices seemed to pause mid-sentence, waiting for him to return.
“Did you ever get off the waiting list that day?” Maya asks Arun. Her face is as calm as if she were asking the time.
“What?” Arun asks.
“That day in November 2004, when we were supposed to talk,” she says, her brow creasing. “Didn’t you tell me that you didn’t get a train ticket…that you were on the waiting list?"
“Maya?” Arun asks. Maya, older, a little worn around the eyes. He grips the door tighter, feeling a warmth and hollow ache all at once. A gap where memories of this person he once knew should be. She looks at him steadily, her face calm, almost expectant. He thinks he should say something. An apology, or a welcome, or even her name again, but the words slip away.
That morning when Arun drove to the store for cigarettes, he saw a woman in a baby-pink dress walking on the pavement. Unhurried, as if she belonged to a different world or time. The regular early morning walkers were all hustling for space on that strip of concrete, but she claimed her own space. Her hair was loose, her eyes far away, as if she had been plucked from someone else's memory and spliced like film into that moment. He didn’t know why he thought of her now, but the image had stuck and he felt a strange sense of unease at the sight. The day before he had seen a kid pushing an empty grocery cart to school. And the other day his neighbor told him the postman was leaving all mail at the third house on the street; the one where no one lived. Little rips in the pattern of things, small and growing.
Arun feels the same unease seeing Maya here, at the door of his childhood home. Did he not get off the waiting list? Which waiting list? He is not able to remember. Maybe he had. The ping of his laptop cuts through the haze, pulling him back to the present, but he doesn't look away from her.
Arun scratches at the gray stubble on his chin, a small habit he’s picked up whenever he’s trying to remember something.
“Hello, my dear. It is very nice to meet you. My name is Mohan. Why don’t you come inside?” Arun’s father says to Maya, and walks back to his chair. He gestures to an empty spot, where another armchair used to be, seemingly unaware of its absence.
The news resumes, the tickers move again, the reporters are relieved that they are still relevant, and they go at it with renewed vigor. They recite the day’s tragedies with practiced ease, eyes wide and unblinking.
“You are watching Fresh News. Let me remind you of today’s headlines, in case you had to step away. Five people were shot dead at a crowded restaurant in Miami. An Indian Member of Parliament was injured after his colleague threw a heavy book at him. The World Health Organization expresses concerns about new findings related to the memory loss pandemic. Now for a short commercial break. Stay tuned for all the details and more.”
Arun places his laptop on the dining table in the kitchen and pulls two chairs close to the TV. His hand pauses on a stack of freshly ironed shirts. He doesn’t move them. He just stands there, giving himself a moment to think, and to remember the answer to Maya’s question. With his back to Maya, he pulls out his notebook and looks for her name. Nothing. He knows her but he had let her memories slip away in the chaos of the initial days of the pandemic. There was only so much one could hold on to. It has become a cause of friction in the new world. Having to tell people that they have been forgotten. But how could he say that to the woman he was once married to?
Maya sits on one of the chairs and places her bag on the floor, between her legs. She is sweating through her light cotton kurta, dark green patches spreading under her arms. Arun notices. It tugs at something in his memory. How she used to say, “I sweat when I’m anxious,” and how he had told her he liked her scent. She wipes her palms on her thighs and shifts slightly in her seat.
“How have you been?” Arun starts with a safe question, like this is simply a meeting between old friends, not two people sifting through a fog of lost memories.
“How have I been in which year?” Maya replies.
“I mean…all these years. Since…the last time we saw each other.”
“I’ve been okay. Apparently, I’m one of those cases where the virus is working at a faster rate than normal. I stayed with Deepa for a while,” Maya says. “My sister,” she adds.
Arun nods.
A beat. Maya looks into Arun’s eyes.
“Did you get those memory vitamins, Arun?” Mohan asks. “For you, not for me. They said on the news that people over eighty don’t need them.”
He turns to Maya. “Do you have kids?”
“No.”
“How about a husband?”
Arun stands, and hovers awkwardly next to his chair, unsure what to do with his hands.
“Do you want something to eat? Payasam?” he asks.
“No,” Maya says, folding her hands in her lap.
“I want a glass of lime juice," Mohan says.
“I don’t have a husband,” Maya says, looking at Mohan. And then to Arun, “I’ll also have lime juice.”
Arun turns back to Maya, his voice low. “You never got married?”
“That one time was enough,” Maya replies, her gaze lingering on the empty space where another armchair used to be.
“But…that was such a short...”
Maya leans forward, her voice almost clinical. “Did you ever say it, Arun? That you wanted out? In very clear words?”
Arun sits back in the chair, his back bent because of years of bad posture, hours on his laptop, carrying his child on his shoulders when she was small, and memories that he wouldn’t mind forgetting.
“Does it even matter anymore, Maya? It’s been so many years. “
“You know how they’ve been asking us to let go of trivial memories so there’s more space for the important ones? I didn't feel like letting go of this one. I just want to know if it ended for nothing.”
He sighs deeply. One thing worse than telling people they were forgotten is telling them that they were not as important to him as he was to them.
“I was really on the waiting list, Maya,” Arun says. “I saw your reminder and I still forgot. And then I thought I won’t make it anyway, so I made other plans at work. Some deadlines, I can’t remember now. You know how it was back then. We were all young, trying to please our bosses, get promoted, make more money...” Arun sets his laptop down on the floor, as if afraid it might slip from his hands. Hoping his story came more from memory than a fiction his guilty brain cooked up for him.
Maya looks at him for a moment, brow creasing. “So, we didn’t meet on the train that day?” she asks.
Arun opens his mouth to reply but the words falter. Did he clear the waiting list and forget about it? Did they meet on the train? He doesn’t know.
“One time, I missed the train from New Delhi to Ahmedabad,” Mohan’s voice cuts through. “That day the train derailed. So many people died,” He takes a sip of the water in the steel cup next to his chair. “Can you add a little more sugar to the lime juice, Arun?” Mohan asks, a few beads of water holding on to the sparse silvery stubble above his lips.
“New theory says that consuming oil can kill brain cells…” the TV drones on.
“No, we didn’t meet, Maya. I’m sure of it,” Arun says, his voice catching. “And then…and then after your trip, you said you didn’t want to see me again. You wanted a divorce.”
He shakes his head. “You don’t remember any of that, but you remember my parents’ address and just show up here after all these years.” He tries to play a reel of images, tightly wound and buried in his mind. But it unspools in all directions, giving him no clues about the order of events in his life. He begins to worry if it was him who said the last word between them.
Maya shifts in her seat. Her voice is quiet but firm.
“You forgot things too, even before all this,” she says. “You forgot to get sugar from the store once, and we drank bitter tea for days. Your friends joked that I didn’t know how to make tea.”
Arun looks at the curve of Maya’s cheek and the slight tremor between her eyebrows. Her open palms resting on her lap. Something in him stirs—he had loved her long ago.
“Do you remember that apartment where we stayed after the wedding? We were there for what, three months?” Arun asks.
“Yes. The one that was a long drive from your office…Do you remember that big brown shelf of drawers the previous owners had left behind? The one that I was so curious about?” Maya asks.
“Yes, you were obsessed with it,” Arun says with a smile.
“Yes. I asked myself and the shelf every day—why had they left it behind? What could be buried in it? Until one day while you were at work, I pulled out the bottom drawer. There was a little model airplane inside, sitting on top of old home decor magazines, cups with no saucers, spoons, souvenirs; things that people leave behind when they think they’ll come back. I kept staring at it, like it was asking me if I would take care of it. Or if I would forget too...”
Maya shifts her gaze from Arun’s face to her hands and then to Mohan’s TV.
“Do you want to watch an old Hindi movie? I like to watch the same movies again and again. I forget the stories of the new movies as soon as I am done watching them. What is your favorite movie?” Mohan asks Maya.
Maya puts her hand into her tote bag, and after a few seconds of rummaging, pulls out a small black notebook with Things to remember in cursive gold letters on the cover. She hands it to Arun without taking her eyes off the TV, which shows animated brain cells exploding in bright colors. Mohan and Maya’s eyes are glazed and their mouths parted slightly.
The book opens at a dog-eared page dated two days ago. A list of things to do, some crossed out and most left untouched. Arun flips through the pages filled with names, addresses, phone numbers and reminders.
He returns to the most recent page. His name. His parents’ address. In two different handwritings. Hers, and then his own.
He had written it. For her. Three days ago.
She had already come to him. He had already forgotten. A faint nausea rises like a diver surfacing too fast, memory forming in painful bubbles. Each one popping before he can grasp it.
“Did you ever get off the waiting list that day?” Maya asks.
She tilts her face the same way she did when she asked it the first time. But something has shifted, as if the words taste familiar in her mouth. She looks tired.
Arun blinks. He is sure she asked him that already. Or maybe he imagined it. Or maybe it was someone else. For a split second he wonders if he is still at the door, about to let her in.
“What?” he asks.
Maya takes the notebook from him and slips it into her bag.
For a moment, Arun imagines the brown shelf again. The one they had left behind.
That bottom drawer. He wonders if the airplane is still there. And if anyone is taking care of it.
Maya walks out of the house.
The anchor’s voice cuts in again.
“Let me remind you: if you feel like you’ve been here before, you probably have. Stay calm. Repeat what you know.”
Arun watches her go.
Not the first time.
Shikha Valsalan grew up in Dubai and India, and currently lives in Atlanta, USA. She works as a product manager in her day job and writes in her free time. Her work has appeared in The Hooghly Review, The Bangalore Review, the Usawa Literary Review, the Roi Fainéant Press and The Disappointed Housewife.