Songs as Time Machines: How Music Holds Our Memories Hostage | by Shafi Hadimani

It happened again yesterday. I was scrolling through Spotify when “Beete Lamhe” started playing. Suddenly, I wasn’t sitting at my desk — I was in the backseat of my friend’s car, watching the Ooty hills disappear in the rearview mirror. The exhaustion of the trip, the bittersweet feeling of vacation ending, the comfortable silence between friends who’d just shared perfect days together. For those four minutes, I was 23 again, believing that moments like these would last forever.

Music, it turns out, is the most powerful time machine we’ve ever invented.

Scientists have fancy terms for this phenomenon — “music-evoked autobiographical memories” or “the reminiscence bump.” But anyone who’s ever been ambushed by a song knows the truth: music doesn’t just remind us of the past; it resurrects it. It doesn’t just trigger memories; it rebuilds entire worlds, complete with all the emotions we thought we’d safely tucked away.

There’s something almost cruel about how precisely music can transport us. A single opening note can undo years of carefully constructed emotional distance. One familiar melody can make a 40-year-old feel 16 again, complete with all the hope and heartbreak that age entailed.

I think about “Ankhiyon Ke Jharokhon Se” — my mother’s absolute favorite song. She’d hum it while folding laundry, always slightly off-key but with such genuine joy that it became the soundtrack of home. She’d say, “This is my song,” with the kind of ownership that only comes from loving something completely. Now, years later, whenever those opening notes play, it’s not just a song — it’s her voice, her smile, her presence filling the room. It’s beautiful and devastating in equal measure.

This is the paradox of musical memory: the very thing that brings us closest to our lost moments can also make their absence feel most acute.

Then there are the songs that capture our most vulnerable selves. “Mujhe raat din bas mujhe chahti ho” from Sangharsh takes me straight back to my Convergys days — those graveyard shifts when the world felt suspended between day and night. I’d play it between calls, letting Kumar Sanu’s voice wash over me in that fluorescent-lit office. There was something about listening to romantic songs at 3 AM that hit differently. Every time I heard those lyrics, I’d close my eyes and imagine singing them to someone I loved, someone who didn’t exist yet but felt so real in those quiet moments.

Now, whenever that song plays, I’m back in that swivel chair, headset around my neck, dreaming of a love story I hadn’t lived yet.

We all have those songs — the ones that come with invisible warning labels. The wedding song that now feels like archaeological evidence of a love that didn’t last. The anthem from your college years that makes you ache for friends who’ve drifted away. The lullaby that takes you back to being small and safe in ways that adult life never quite replicates.

But it’s not just the obvious emotional milestones that music captures. Sometimes it’s the most mundane moments that become the most precious. The song that was playing during late-night study sessions. The tune your dad always whistled while getting ready for work. The random hit that happened to be on the radio during the best conversation you ever had with your sibling.

Music seems to have this supernatural ability to preserve not just the facts of our memories, but their emotional texture. When “Beete Lamhe” plays, I don’t just remember driving back from Ooty — I remember exactly how content I felt, how friendship felt like the most important thing in the world, how the future seemed like an adventure we’d all share together.

There’s something profound about how democratic musical memory is. It doesn’t matter if you have perfect pitch or can’t carry a tune to save your life — music affects us all the same way. A call center employee and a classical musician can be equally devastated by hearing “their song” in an elevator.

And unlike photographs, which show us how things looked, or journals, which capture what we thought, music preserves how things felt. It’s emotional archaeology at its finest.

I’ve noticed that certain songs become time capsules for entire phases of our lives. That romantic song you played on repeat during your BPO shift doesn’t just remind you of work — it reminds you of who you were then, what you hoped for, what love meant to your younger self.

The cruel irony is that we never choose these songs consciously. They choose us. “Mujhe raat din bas” happened to be playing during my most introspective night shifts, and now it’s forever linked to that version of myself — the one who believed in perfect love stories. You don’t decide that this song will represent this time — it just happens, usually when you’re not paying attention.

This is why heartbreak and music are so intimately connected. When a relationship ends, you don’t just lose the person — you lose songs. Entire playlists become off-limits, whole artists too painful to navigate. I know people who still can’t listen to certain singers years after a breakup, as if the music itself betrayed them.

But there’s also magic in how music can preserve people long after they’re gone. My mother never said “I love you” in grand gestures, but she’d always request “Ankhiyon Ke Jharokhon Se” at family gatherings, and her face would light up when it played. Now that song is her way of saying it, over and over, every time I hear it.

Maybe this is why we’re so protective of our musical memories. Why we’re cautious about playing “our song” too often — afraid we might wear out its power. Why certain playlists feel too sacred to share, too personal to explain.

In a world where everything feels temporary, where photos get deleted and messages disappear, songs remain constant. They’re time machines that never break down, portals that never close. They hold our past selves safe, exactly as we were in those unrepeatable moments.

So the next time “Beete Lamhe” comes on shuffle, or you hear your mother’s favorite song in an unexpected place, don’t be embarrassed if your eyes well up. Don’t apologize for being suddenly, inexplicably homesick for a call center chair or a car ride that happened years ago.

You’re not being overly sentimental. You’re just human, experiencing one of the most beautiful aspects of being alive — the way music weaves itself so completely into our hearts that hearing it again is like being reunited with pieces of ourselves we thought we’d lost.

After all, we don’t just listen to music. We live inside it. And sometimes, if we’re very lucky, it lets us visit home again.

Source link