No. I am not a control-freak. I just like having things in their little dockets. And I like to christen these dockets. Which was why I was tidying up my mail account – unclogging the inbox, creating folders called Nefertiri and Nefertiti for all the class notes ever mailed and seriously contemplating creating another called Bubba. When I came across a mail I had sent to me (I tend to do that a lot) in 1999.
And thus it was today, almost a decade later, that I sat reading through the largest profusion of morbidity that has ever come my way… and I have read Dickens, by the way. I was 13… and I wrote of dying people and handicapped children and jilted lovers. In poetry and prose. And watched Tom and Jerry in my spare time… which at 13, was half the bloody day. And laughed… I genuinely giggled each time Jerry hit Tom over the head with a saucepan.
Three autumns later, I looked all my attempts at rhyming “cupid” with “dup’d” in the eye and said up yours. And I stopped writing.
So thank your stars that I do not write of the Grim who “scurried nigh with stealthy steps” or of the little brook that “bled with the riches of mankind” anymore. Or of the “nowhere man”. I am conveniently shallow now and laugh indulgently at the priggish child I must have been.
A small part of me however, wants to hunt till the ends of the earth for the thin, red spiral-book with which I sat by the window just after it had rained and looked as far out into the distance as I could before writing of "the puppy that drowned" in rounded, cursive writing. The thin, red spiral-book without which I never went anywhere, not even to school – the Muse is the Muse, even in the middle of a boring Geography lesson on Rabi crops. The thin, red spiral-book which I pretended was a secret but was only too glad to show-off to anyone who asked. The thin, red spiral-book which I christened with a little gangajal snuck out of the puja cupboard, and whose name I have now forgotten.
And a small part of me wishes I believed in second chances.
And thus it was today, almost a decade later, that I sat reading through the largest profusion of morbidity that has ever come my way… and I have read Dickens, by the way. I was 13… and I wrote of dying people and handicapped children and jilted lovers. In poetry and prose. And watched Tom and Jerry in my spare time… which at 13, was half the bloody day. And laughed… I genuinely giggled each time Jerry hit Tom over the head with a saucepan.
Three autumns later, I looked all my attempts at rhyming “cupid” with “dup’d” in the eye and said up yours. And I stopped writing.
So thank your stars that I do not write of the Grim who “scurried nigh with stealthy steps” or of the little brook that “bled with the riches of mankind” anymore. Or of the “nowhere man”. I am conveniently shallow now and laugh indulgently at the priggish child I must have been.
A small part of me however, wants to hunt till the ends of the earth for the thin, red spiral-book with which I sat by the window just after it had rained and looked as far out into the distance as I could before writing of "the puppy that drowned" in rounded, cursive writing. The thin, red spiral-book without which I never went anywhere, not even to school – the Muse is the Muse, even in the middle of a boring Geography lesson on Rabi crops. The thin, red spiral-book which I pretended was a secret but was only too glad to show-off to anyone who asked. The thin, red spiral-book which I christened with a little gangajal snuck out of the puja cupboard, and whose name I have now forgotten.
And a small part of me wishes I believed in second chances.
