Lost

Minds, computers, flatmates

I have been thinking of my past computers. Tech nostalgia for artefacts of memory transfer - floppies, USB sticks. external hard drives. And the early laptops. I have had Dell, HP, IBM (the old fat ones, ones with the toggle mouse), and in the US, two of my beloved computers were made by VAIO. Sleek, stylish, now no longer in the market. Their memories are accompanied by the memories of past minds, past obsessions, past demons. I am glad in some ways those hard drives are no longer with me. A particular track in an album titled Appalachia Waltz by Edgar Meyer, Mark O’Connor, Yo-Yo Ma from the late 90s has been haunting me. I was totally uneducated in my youth, and found it through my 2009 New Haven flatmate who was a rather severe, Korean American med student. I can’t remember properly now, but I think she was a cellist herself. I heard and wanted to own the album, couldn’t afford the CD. She gave it to me (in a way that severe people are always so kind) on a USB stick. It went inside my VAIO laptop hard drive. I didn’t know who Yo-Yo Ma was.

I carried it around for some years until the YouTube version of muscial consumption took over. I had not touched a violin ever at the time, but the scratchy, low sounds of the double bass seemed hypnotic. And then there was the time of Nitin Sawhney and the Indo-Soul violin-based sounds, which slowly made me forget this album and the track Chief Sitting in the Rain. Recently, I began to hum it and then tried to locate it on YouTube. Everywhere, the album showed up and its sequel, but their music did not match the tune in my head. Until this morning, when I found it. And with that, its aura has come to an end.

I have had the good fortune of sharing homes with some artist type people. One person who shared a flat with me in New Haven was a choir conductor and organist. He used to hum very high notes in the shower in a strong, ungendered voice. He left after a while, and was replaced by a theatre set designer whose actor boyfriend also spent a lot of time in the apartment. She was very beautiful, and was from Appalachia, if my memory serves well. These apartments now seem fictitious. Their occupants, including me and my endless pajama-clad Netflix-DVD-rental angst-ridden life compartments, seem imaginary.

At this time, I watched Girls on Hulu OTT with my then partner inside this apartment. It was my first time watching anything via OTT. I asked him naively, “It streams on the internet, all of it?!” It was a time of naivete or rather the fag end of the time of naivete. The Obama era was slowly revealing its true colours. I had started feeling a dissertation grow into a large fire inside my belly. Part of me wanted to finish it, part of me wanted to burn it.

[Study desk vantage point. New Haven 2013. Copyright: Atreyee Majumder.]