Ephemeral memories

On the evening of 2o September, a Saturday, the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad was blasted. A gaping crater, more than 30 feet deep, was created by a bomb of unimaginable power. The fallen bodies, the building's burning façade, will be etched into the minds of Southasians for a very long time. It will also act as a reminder of the unending – or, rather, escalating – miseries of Pakistan.

On the morning of 21 September, I found myself calling up the Marriot's website. I decided to try to book a room at a hotel that I knew was no more, together with the lives that were taken by the blast. The site asked me to choose the country and city, and then briefly responded, "The hotel in this location is unavailable on your dates. Try changing your travel dates." I did that but, of course, the response was the same.

It is always tragically disconcerting when an individual dies, with the e-mails remaining in the inbox, the addresses ready for use, the website or blog living on until someone acts to switch it off. We are living in times of such flux, and the revolution in electronic communication is still so relatively new, that it is only recently that this trend of departures has begun to hit me, for one.

In an earlier era, I had been reluctant to strike out names of the deceased from my tattered old address book. And so, today, these names remain long, long after the relations, friends, respected elders and others have passed on. The same, I find, is beginning to happen with e-mail messages and e-addresses.

The Marriot was full of Islamabad's well-to-do locals, enjoying the Ifthar evening parties in two separate banquets. There would also have been many overseas visitors in the lobby, restaurants and guestrooms. And they would have left a trail of e-mails, answered and unanswered, all over. The same with the blasts in Delhi of 13 September. There will be numbers and names in other people's mobile phones, the e-mail or sms sent, or the voice message left behind just before the blast took a life.

There is nothing new in or about death, of course. And the world is full of the notes and artefacts of those who have moved on. Other than those who are alive today, everyone who has ever lived is now dead. That is a truism if ever there was one. But what does seem new is the nature and immediacy of electronic communication that the dead leave behind.

Notes and messages from the departed were first to be found on wall paintings, then stone and metal tablets,  papyrus and paper. Later on, new communications technologies allowed these to be left aurally, on gramophone records and tapes. Audio-visually, home videos took this capability a step further; and photographs, of course, have long been available, to remind us of the likenesses of friends and family no longer with us.

What is different with the e-mail messages that I retain in my computer inbox, which I refuse to delete, is the nonchalance and immediacy of what these friends have written. And so, the publisher friend from Delhi, who wrote after his retirement: "Otherwise, I hope you will remain in touch – it would be great to catch up with you whenever you come to Delhi. How goes the peace/democratic process? Seems to be chugging along quite well." Within a week, he was gone, struck down by a massive stroke at a hill-station retreat.

Or the person revered as a guru who wrote, "I am planning to publish my consolidated bibliography. Can you help completing the following two entries by referring at the library." That bibliography never got completed, because he was killed in a helicopter crash a few days later. In an effort to maintain my link to these friends and elders, I have cut and pasted their messages here, rather than type them up myself. It is a small, electronic effort to keep their lines alive in the 'first generation'.

Somehow, e-mails and blogs have a way of feeling even more immediate than the word written or typed on paper. Unfortunately – and this is something rarely kept in mind – electronic communications are much more ephemeral than paper. Once a computer crashes, or once someone switches off the server for good, the communications vanish. Seen like this, paper and papyrus are better.

In this way I have come to realise how fragile are the communications written from those who have passed on, for all the facility of someone being there on my screen at the click of a button. Their memory, as much as can be jogged from what I can read on the monitor, will disappear the moment this hard disk crashes. And the same will happen to all the mails that you and I have written on the computer, after you and I are gone. They will remain on your friends' and colleagues' computer only as long as the hard disk remains alive.