I was sitting with a friend in Triveni’s outdoor space. By the late afternoon, the cafe had become unbearable. The mist fans were technically functioning, but only in the symbolic way many of our cities function: loudly, expensively, and without producing relief. 

Delhi was crossing 42 degrees celcius, and I was performing composure with my horrible, overpriced, and melting iced coffee. We were complaining about the heat in the indulgent language that is available to people like us, who can afford to buy temporary distance from it. “Maybe we should leave, go to a beach or something for a couple of days or go on a cruise.” 

Then, in the middle of this ordinary wishful thinking, he mentioned the boating accident in Jabalpur. 

Several people had died after a tourist boat capsized. We spoke about it briefly, swinging from the excitement of planning a trip to the temporary heaviness that tragedies often produce, ending with the ritualistic sentence: “This country is impossible!” 

The waiter arrived, and we went back to discussing the price of the coffee and what else we could eat. 

We all experience this fluid movement between catastrophe and ordinary life. We laugh during wars, flirt during famines, worry about what to eat while governments collapse. Human beings live amidst disasters too. 

It is not indifference, after all; the psyche cannot remain in a permanent state of confrontation with death. Yet there is undoubtedly something disturbing about our quick shift from horrific to the mundane. 

The tragedy did not disappear. Neither did our awareness of it. But within minutes, it had somehow become lighter, less demanding, easier to place alongside coffee, food and holiday plans.

Grief, Interrupted: Memory Without Ritual

In extreme heat, nothing settles properly. Things rot quickly, bodies become irritable, attention spans shorten, exhaustion enters the body so insidiously. The day feels overfull and strangely unreal, as if the heat makes digestion impossible, everything passes without leaving a trace. A conversation, some grief, a headline, a moment of outrage—each arrives with force and then seems to dissolve back into the atmosphere of the day. 

Public life operates through a similar psychic climate. Things happen, we register them, we react, we talk about them with nuance for a while, and then they get saturated into general (often truthful) sentences that stand the test of time. But intensity rarely accumulates into consequence. 

Something evaporates between witnessing and transformation. Water evaporating doesn’t disappear. It changes state from liquid to vapor; it enters the atmosphere waiting to return. 

In public life, events don’t vanish from us. They change forms.

The space between witnessing and transformation is an interesting one because the dominant language available to us for speaking about public exhaustion relies largely on memory: more specifically, on forgetting. We say people forget too quickly, or we lament the collapse of attention spans. But my aunt still speaks about the 2002 Gujarat pogrom in sudden fragments, unprompted, as though the event keeps condensing in the present—briefly, returning in a denser form before lifting off again. 

Some people I work with remember humiliations from their school or childhood with extraordinary precision decades after they occurred. Families organize themselves around losses that are never officially recognized: a demolished home, a sudden displacement, an unexpected death. Long after an event has disappeared from public conversation, it can continue to structure our intimacy, what we are cautious of, who we are loyal to, and the stories we believe in. 

So it isn’t “forgetting.” When people move on, when people survive, memory persists, even when we are saturated.

Maybe we can ask ourselves a better question: how have we lived with what we remember? Grief is rarely a private psychological task, at least historically. Deaths were marked, names were spoken aloud, stories were repeated. Whether through funerals, mourning rituals, memorials, testimonies, prayer or public acts of remembrance, societies have developed ways to give suffering a form. 

These practices do not just preserve memory; they also transform it. They allow our experiences to become part of a collective narrative and give communities time to reorganize themselves. When writing about mourning more than a century ago, Freud wrote about grief not as the act of remembering but as the labor of giving it a place in psychic life. Mourning requires a gradual reorganization of one’s relationship with what has been lost. 

So what happens when neither individuals nor societies are afforded that time? 40 years ago, my father took a month off when his father passed away. But when my patient recently lost his mother, he could only take four days off because he had “consumed” all assigned days off in the year and could not afford to go on unpaid leave.

Mass death itself is not new. Wars, famines, epidemics, displacements, and political violence have been a part of human history for centuries. What feels different now are the conditions under which catastrophe is encountered. We are exposed to more suffering than ever before, often in real time and from far beyond the boundaries of our immediate lives. Before grief can acquire language, attention is demanded elsewhere. 

 So the grief doesn’t disappear; it is present, but without a ritual or a shared acknowledgement, it doesn’t “matter.” The result is a weakening of the processes through which experiences can become integrated. Ritualization, memorialization, reflection, or even sustained attention feel rare. 

Events are witnessed, rarely metabolized. They remain psychically present without becoming part of a larger story about what has happened, what it means, and what ought to follow. 

Evaporation: No Time to Integrate

Extreme heat exhausts the capacity to metabolize. Survival itself becomes a primary task. 

Political life resembles this condition: constant exposure to severe events disturbs us, but they are too continuous to integrate fully. Think of the 2016 demonetization process in India: who stood in lines in extreme conditions, whose personal finances are mostly cash-based, who suffered the consequences of a sudden change? And within the sudden urgency, who had the privilege to question, enrage, organize?

Nothing settles, and the next thing arrives. The atmosphere feels thermally overloaded.

A train accident.
A bridge falling.
Fake voters.
Deleted voters.
A communal speech.
A boat capsizing.
A protest.
A lynching.
A missing person.
A suicide.

This doesn’t mean all things are equally important; the mind can hold multiple emotions together, but sometimes it is difficult to establish a hierarchy.

When our bodies are overheated, our tempers shorten, sleep is difficult, our tongues feel sharper, more desperate, more urgent. When our minds overheat, we produce fantasies of escape. This is why contemporary political life depends not only on censorship, but also on overload. Overstimulated people retreat to private survival because collective thinking requires psychic space. 

It is important to distinguish between evaporation and repression. Repression is (un)conscious turning away because the mind cannot bear the pain. Evaporation is when the environment forces the person to turn away—not because the person is incapable of feeling, but because the conditions don’t exist. 

In the case of constant exposure to catastrophe, there is no repression, only dissipation because what disappears from immediate awareness is not actively pushed underground, but dispersed into the atmosphere of everyday life. In the clinic, this looks like a strange inability to locate the feeling that was definitely there a minute ago. A patient describes hearing about a colleague suddenly passing away and feeling shocked. But within the hour, they find themselves annoyed by the traffic, worrying about time, and sending an email.

Repression enforces active forgetting, which requires constant psychic labor to maintain. Evaporated memories don’t bury anything. The heat of constant catastrophe causes events to lift off, change states, become ambient; they remain in the air, circulating without form. The problem is not that “people forget” but that they have no structure to condense against. No surface that is cool enough to return it to something holdable. 

In the clinic, I have been noticing more fragmentation in this context. There is a difference between feeling emotionally empty and being overheated. 

Some overheated patients speak in rapid transitions—a lot like our Instagram feeds:

A genocide.
A breakup.
A successful interview.
Rising rent.
Random anxiety.
Specific anxiety.
Exhaustion.
Parents.
Children.
Myself.

When too many things arrive quickly, it can feel like a flat psychic surface.

Some of these conditions arise from overload, others are deliberately engineered.

State-Sponsored Remembrance: Whose Memory Weighs More? 

With all forms of media being overpopulated or manipulated, remembrance itself seems increasingly administered. States, institutions, algorithms, archives, news, and public narratives determine which losses acquire permanence and which are forced to fade into bureaucratic obscurity. 

So, question two: who decides which loss is publicly grievable? 

This is what evaporation names—the breakdown of the conditions that allow memories to condense into consequence. Some conditions prevent evaporated water from returning. In a sealed environment, like a pressure cooker, vapor builds without a release. Some environments do not allow evaporation to complete its cycle. Vapor accumulates but cannot disperse, return, or transform. 

Administrative violence is a lot like this. It participates in determining how events are remembered. Some tragedies are taught, repeated, and absorbed into the story a nation tells about itself, and others are reduced to disputed numbers or lies.

But their absence from public discourse is not an absence from psychic life. People and communities remember. 

There is a strange moral superiority to the oft-repeated claim that “people forget,” as though remembering itself is equivalent to political resistance, as if memory is automatically transformative. As if nothing else needs to change, systemically, as if memory is all we need to prevent future tragedy. It is strangely comfortable to locate the failure in individuals rather than in the social and political conditions, implying that “if only” people cared enough, they remembered hard enough, tragedies would not repeat themselves. 

Yet, on a grand scale, entire nations are organised around remembrance without life becoming any less violent or less tragic. But the US institutionalising the 9/11 attacks with “Never Forget,” or the very beautiful India Gate, that is memorialised with the names of freedom fighters carved on it, or the justification of Nakba through the Holocaust makes me wonder: what events are we allowed to remember, and whose memory weighs more? 

State- sponsored remembrance does not prevent repetition. If anything, states are deeply invested in managing memory, in creating narratives, and disseminating them as “facts”. Only some histories are monumentalized; others are administratively thinned out until they become purely anecdotal. 

The question, then, is not whether societies remember, but whose memories are permitted permanence. In other words, whose memories are prevented from evaporating? Thus, some memories acquire national permanence, and those that are systemically unarchived—despite their scale. 

The “official” versus “unofficial” death tolls, during the COVID-19 pandemic in India, for example, feel psychically unresolved in this way. Grief, fear, and discomfort were everywhere. Images circulated briefly of funerals, overwhelmed hospitals, oxygen shortages; before we all were asked to get vaccinated, and move on with our lives, to go back to work, to spend money on air travel once again. As if a million deaths did not happen.

The state modified the number of lives lost during COVID significantly to hide its own incompetence, while some people tried to memorialize the injustice. We all know whose voice has prevailed, what truths were buried.

A rapid resumption of daily life is a cheap replacement for resolution. And it completely inhibits transformation.

The pandemic returns now, in fragments: someone still speaks about the oxygen cylinder they couldn’t find, another recalls spending days searching for hospital beds, and how the public health system abandoned them, someone remembers strangers coordinating resources through WhatsApp groups when formal systems collapsed. People remember what archives hide. 

It is erasure that requires constant labor, not memory.

Evaporated history condenses through ordinary speech. Families remember demolished homes, communities remember riots, elders remember the names of villages that no longer exist “officially”; and when their anger and disappointment have no other place to go, it turns inwards. People become vigilant, careful, hoarders because their survival narrative is organized around the tragedies the State has chosen to erase. 

Events don’t disappear, consequences do. The problem is not memory or its absence. What doesn’t exist are the structures that connect an event to what follows from it. Consequences create continuity, from injury to response: acknowledgement, accountability, some systemic change, or even an admission that something happened allows us to resolve something psychologically. 

On Persistence

Certain things refuse to disappear. This is what interrupts the fantasy of erasure; memory survives unevenly but stubbornly. And in the right conditions, they condense back into the present. 

The problem isn’t that people fail to feel, but that contemporary political conditions increasingly isolate feelings from structures. We carry fragments privately while institutions continue uninterrupted—a peculiar loneliness.

We suspect something irreversible has happened, but the world proceeds with administrative normalcy. Elections still happen (without your name on the list), cafes remain full (despite the heat), offices reopen (after mass layoffs), TV debates move on, people buy essentials (even as things become increasingly unaffordable). And we begin to wonder if our own disturbance is excessive because collective life offers so little confirmation that the event mattered, and nothing changes. 

Erasure is not loss; it is loss without acknowledgement. 

Summer afternoons in May often feel like a suspension between hypervisibility and hallucination. Everything is too exposed/too bright. The city appears on the verge of combustion, yet daily life with obedience continues. This is the emotional climate I am trying to describe: not anesthesia, not forgetting, not hopelessness, but something closer to living in conditions where experiences struggle to sediment into consequence but traces remain. 

Much like that afternoon in Triveni, the boating accident has entered the atmosphere of experience, as a trace that may return as caution, anxiety, or recognition the next time we see a boat.

Do we remember? Yes, in fragments that return without a warning. The question is where there are conditions in which memory can complete its cycle: condense, fall, become something that changes the ground it falls on. This requires surfaces: institutions, shared spaces, collective structures all cool enough to receive it. Right now, those surfaces are either absent or engineered to mirror the warmth, and everything feels unresolved. Even now, somewhere in the city, somebody is sitting at a local tea stall, complaining about systemic violence. Somebody is recounting 1984 riots like it was yesterday. 

Perhaps this is what makes the present feel so exhausting: not that memory has disappeared, but that it remains suspended. Like warm air trapped above asphalt, memory remains and circulates, unresolved, unable to become rain.