Five prompts means five short movements. Keep them in the printed order and your talk will have a shape; the whole thing should run to about two minutes.
- One object, song or place — not a tour of your childhood. The smaller the subject, the better the talk.
- Sensory detail is the graded part, since the poem you have just studied is built on it. Give at least three senses: what it looked like, what it sounded or smelt like, what it felt like to touch.
- One specific incident, with a date or an age attached — “when I was seven, the winter my father was posted away”. A general memory is not a memory.
- Impact, then meaning. These are different: impact is what changed in you; meaning is why you still return to it.
- Use the past tense for the memory and the present for the reflection. Use two or three of the book’s opening phrases so the joins are smooth.
Sample answer:
“I want to speak about a steel tumbler. It is an ordinary one — the kind every Indian kitchen has — but this one has a dent near the base and my grandmother’s initials, S.L., scratched on it with a nail.
It is about the size of my fist, and the steel has gone dull and slightly cloudy from forty years of washing. When you set it down on a granite slab it makes a particular flat clink, not a ring, because of the dent. In winter it is so cold to hold that you take it by the rim; in summer, filled with buttermilk, it sweats and slips.
Growing up, I fondly remember drinking my morning milk from it at my grandmother’s house in Belgaum, always standing at the kitchen door because I was not allowed inside while the stove was on. She would hold the tumbler out at exactly my height without looking up from the pan. When she died two winters ago, my mother asked me if I wanted anything of hers, and I asked for the tumbler. My aunt laughed and said, take the silver one at least.
It has changed the way I think about what is worth keeping. I used to assume that important things are expensive things. This one taught me that an object matters because of the number of ordinary mornings it has been present at.
It is still meaningful to me because it is the only thing I own that reproduces her exactly — not a photograph of her face, but the sound and the cold and the height at which her hand used to stop. Tagore says he cannot remember his mother, only the tune of a song she hummed. I know what he means. I cannot describe my grandmother’s voice, but I can hear that flat clink on the granite from three rooms away.”