From a great emptiness

| 2 MINUTE READ | First Memories & Oil Refineries

I was born in 1970. My first memory is from almost two years later, of a rooster crowing outside a room in the coastal town of Haldia. Of my brother and me watching this creature running in circles outside the neighbour’s kitchen. It was to be killed soon for dinner, an idea I was unaware of and unmoved by. But it troubled my brother who was seventeen months older.

For a while, this image of a rooster running in circles of dust with a bobbing neck kept returning, surrounded by the aura of my brother’s disappointment. In dreams as I slept, like a hauntingly enigmatic signal. Up flights of stairs, across dim corridors and up to a familiar beige door I called home, like a warm yet discomfiting memory. Until, overwhelmed by the profusion of life, it gently slipped away.

Like every story, this one that brought me my first memories, began millions of years ago. When energy from the sun trapped in the buried debris of plants and animals gradually responded to the alchemy of heat and pressure to become oil. A sloshing subterranean liquid battery, that swallowed the secrets of the sun until it geysered up an oil well in Baku in the mid-nineteenth century and transformed how people travelled, traded, built, fought, idled, dreamt – and through a slow and circuitous route of cause and effect, turned my grandfather into an entrepreneur.

In the seventies, as India lumbered to absorb and keep pace with the habits of the modern world, an oil refinery was being built in Haldia. Over the previous decade, my grandfather’s young company was in the throes of evolving from a dangerous idea to a promising hope. He was contracted to build one part of the oil storage tank farm at Haldia, with the rest given to a government firm. When they failed, it was also offloaded to him, causing a minor uproar in parliament.

Since the only durable asset a contractor has is his reputation, my father was deputed to camp there and complete the unfinished work on this assignment. While his young wife towed along, my brother and I were there for a brief visit. My father worked on site until well past midnight and was never around when we were awake. So for me, Haldia was all about the wailing sounds of the rooster. For my brother, it was its ominous fate.

A faded picture I found three decades later, of my brother holding my hand and posing as I looked up at him, is what jogged to life this faint impression. And reminded me of the magical quality of first memories. Of how they arise from a great emptiness, dragging us along into the experience of our existence.