Isolation offered its own form of companionship - Jhumpa Lahiri

What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered, Augustine said.

If I want to understand what moves me, what confuses me, what pains me — everything that makes me react, in short — I have to put it into words.

It was the English word she used. It was in English that the past was unilateral; in Bengali, the word for yesterday, kal, was also the word for tomorrow. In Bengali one needed an adjective, or relied on the tense of a verb, to distinguish what had already happened from what would be.