‘Remembering You On Your 32nd Birthday’ — #TheMemoryProject

It’s in an ordinary, mundane, unexpected minute that life can change. Grief, as Didion wrote, “turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it”. Until you lose someone close—a parent, a partner, a friend—that place of understanding will remain distant to you. That place will remain imagined, incomprehensible. It will reside in fear. “There is no way that one can be prepared for it”, says Tanvi Mallya, a 28-year old neuropsychologist from Mumbai. Tanvi lost her husband Prasad last year on an ordinary day, in an unexpected minute. He was thirty years old and he had a heart attack. He did not suffer.

“Suddenly it was like, ‘What do we do?’”, says Tanvi, “I haven’t known the last decade of my life without him”. Tanvi and Prasad met when she was seven and he was ten and her family had just moved to the building next door. At seventeen and twenty, they became friends. Then best friends. It began with exchanges of movies and music, books to read, and then slipped wonderfully into something deeper. They fell in love, they got married. They loved and they loved and they loved each other above all else.

“He was like the perfect yin to my yang” Tanvi says, “We were like chalk and cheese but one thing that always sailed us through was open and honest communication”.

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Even minutes with this story in the video you just saw will tell you that much. What it won’t tell you, however, is just how much that love seeps through in every one of Tanvi’s actions and words in an attempt to keep his memory alive in the way it deserves to be. Prasad struggled with depression, especially during his four years at engineering school, but it was around the time that him and Tanvi met that he decided to make himself better. “He constantly told me how this relationship gave him something to look forward to in life,” Tanvi explains, “but that scared me, I used to tell him that isn’t how it should be, I didn’t want to be a drug”. It was however, a superfluous fear, as their relationship grew into a healthy and mutual exchange of emotional support. “He would look forward to things”, she said, “Initially he would just come out spend time with me, but then he actually started to plan things, trips, traveling”. He began to develop a new zest for life, a need to live and keep living. “Sometimes people just need to be loved”, she said and smiled.

Prasad never liked his own birthdays, Tanvi told us. While dealing with his depression he wasn’t able to look forward to events, celebrations, anniversaries. However, as the years went by, as their time spent together increased, that too began to change. He would start to look forward to commemorating happy occasions. In the days leading up to his birthday “he would drop hints to find out what we were planning”, she says. The day of the shoot coincidently ended up being Prasad’s birthday. She told us before we started rolling our cameras that she would have to leave a little early—she was going to “their spot”, Doolally in Andheri, to celebrate for him. “It’s like he planned this”, she says, “spending the whole day thinking about him.” In her birthday note, she writes “Later in the evening I’m going out to our other spot to remember and celebrate you. Some of our other friends might join in. Maybe you’ll meet us there? Happy birthday, my love”

It’s only been a little over a year that Tanvi has been coping with Prasad’s death, but I’m at a loss for words to describe the kind of selfless strength she practices. “As big as the loss was for me, it had also really negatively affected our friends and families” she says with unresistant practicality, “the only way that any of them would come out of this, was if I came out of this”. Perhaps it was her experience with counselling and psychology that fostered such command over her emotions; but grief, still, is only a place you know once you reach it. “Of course, it wasn’t all hunky-dory” Tanvi reflects, “there were days I broke down, it would often catch me unaware, and that was the scariest.” There is, after all, no way to prepare for it. There are only ways to cope.

We tend to talk about loss in abstract terms and euphemisms, in conversations far from practicality. We talk about death at a distance, and so often the nuances of a lost life go unheard of. The arrangements that need to be made, the papers that need to be signed, the money that needs to be put in order. Apart from the emotional hurdles to overcome, there are often financial struggles that torment the grieving process. Losing a partner can mean going from a double income household to a single income household, and losing a parent can mean the loss of primary financial support. In detaching ourselves from death, we also neglect to talk about what happens to those left behind in its remnants.

#TheMemoryProject, powered by HDFC Life, is a space for such stories. It’s a collection of narratives about love, loss, and nostalgia. It’s a place to celebrate the lives of those we have had the privilege of knowing, to cherish the memories we’ve had with them, to honor the value they hold, and will always hold. It’s also a place to celebrate the living, those who have loved, lost, and overcome. We lose something when we don’t remember the people we have lost, and we lose something when we don’t pay attention to such stories of others. So here’s the place for it.

Bringing all these stories together, we’d like to invite you to a very special evening on April 28th for our Memory Project event at G5A in Lower Parel, Mumbai, 5PM onwards. It will be an evening of poetry, interactive art installations, music, and letter writing. If you send your stories in to us, you will find them there. Please RSVP at the link here.