Recollecting my childhood memories, I often wonder why I used to try so hard to get rid of my strange thoughts. My incessant effort to push myself away from those thoughts and to find myself an acceptable position in the real, non-fantastical adult society did finally drift me apart from the “weird world of childhood”. Most of my memories are visuals or emotions which I consciously try to well up in me when I am desperate to reconnect with my past. Sometimes they are snippets of rants, colours, conversations. They come back to me in incoherent pieces, a whirlwind of sensations as if after a long time I was again spinning round and round and round till I would be overwhelmed by the feeling that I was the centre of the universe and when I would finally stop, the world would still be spinning. It created a heady effect and I used to love to see every colour mixing and blending with one another as I would ignore my mother’s voice pleading me to stop. The memories of my childhood , that I’ve often heard from my mother and elders are not necessarily weird. It is happy, carefree, summery days of my life where my father threw me up and caught me mid-air, as I would be falling down and my hair flying up. I can never remember experiencing most of the stories that my mother narrates. All of those sound to me like the videos from the handy cam advertisements. But some that have been told to me again and again from many years have invariably become a part of my thoughts, I cannot remember whether they were real occurances or figment of imagination. Nevertheless, they do evoke sensations and are one of the many pieces of the tornado of my mind.
I remember the feeling of extreme loneliness that would settle in my mind like thick, impenetrable clouds upon seeing people and places disappear into a dot - loneliness due to both, being left behind and leaving people behind. The merry-go-rounds in the fairs used to be my favourite ride because I always knew there was no permanent good-bye. The sadness of waving my parents good bye would be a fleeting thing as I would be re-approaching their happy faces even before I had finished waving to them. Farewell always came with the promise of return. Soon these fleeting farewells became longer and more sorrowful as I was admitted into a play home. I never understood why I had to be left behind, to be separated, which I never really came to terms with. In fact it became worse after I was admitted into a ‘school’. I was revolted by the uniformity in I everything I saw, the dirty yellow walls with peeling paint, the smelly toilets, my teacher who looked the same every day, the ruled notebooks, the benches and most of all my red checkered uniform with a triangle of the hand kerchief pinned to my breast pocket would make me feel like the most unlucky child in the world. I felt doomed by the permanence of these surroundings. The longing for the Sunday when I could just lie between my parents on the bed till the sun was high above our roof was the only idea I feasted on. But I’d become more withdrawn. I couldn’t stand the moral stories in my English text book because all these morals seemed to guide me away from what I always wanted. It loved everything that I was not. I lived in this gap between the moral stories and the fairy tale desires, between the fear of acting immoral and desire to do the same. Confused I grew more silent and resigned when I heard my neighbour appreciating my obedient nature.
One day in school I spotted a girl secretly digging her nose. Too ashamed to admit that she’d been doing the dirty act she could not ask the teacher for the permission to wash her hands. However she cunningly wiped her fingers on the under-surface of the bench. Witnessing this entire secret affair, I was repulsed. I could never sit on that bench again. I mentally noted a small mark on the bench so that even if the benches were shuffled I would be able to identify this discreetly sick bench from the rest. But, how far could I control events since no one else apart from that girl herself and me knew about it. What if some aayah touches the bench unknowingly and then touch mine. I leave my bag and pouch on it. Yuck. The idea crept little by little. I would scrub myself fervently after running home from school. Thinking of it I would rub harder. I had become a cleanliness and control freak. I would avoid taking the short route to school as the algae on smitten buildings, on the way, would slowly attack the edges of my mind, the mouldy green seem to grow on the insides of my yellow cranium, and I knew I could never wash it clean, no matter how hard I rubbed it would decay there, stay there and my every thought felt rotten and smelly. I did not want to think because the thoughts reeked. Nevertheless I thought, I could not stop it, no matter how hard I tried. I stared at black walls to stay empty but I couldn’t. I’d lost control of my own life, my own thoughts.
Sometimes, I would really want to write, write these stories that I lived and that wouldn’t be like my textbook stories. But I just did not. Perhaps I was too scared to discover that I could be untalented and incapable of one more thing. Perhaps more than discovering about my incapability was the fear of ruling out the possibility of being able to write. More uptight and less expressive, I continued to be, until a couple of years back when I met a friend.
Roderick was a talented, talkative and a fully grown adult when I first saw him. A German boy, he was specializing in sculpting. He’d landed in India to travel and experience the sculptures. For the amount of control he had in chiselling life out of rocks his ways and manners seemed funnily uncontrolled and carefree. He ruled his own life and always claimed to believe in choice. He read a lot and wrote a lot more. It was on one of the most mundane days of college that he said he had an activity planned for me. Wondering what the activity could be I followed him to the play ground. What I saw made no sense to me. There was a folded sheet of white paper and bottles and bottles of ink. I started acting as he was instructing. I spread the sheet of paper on the ground, it was a very large sheet, infact made by joining four chart papers. Then I opened an ink bottle as he said, next he asked me to pour it on the sheet. I was too stunned, not sure if it was a joke or it was an instruction, I gave a confused look. Opening one ink bottle himself, he poured all the ink on the sheet. I followed his actions. One by one I started emptying every bottle on the paper as tears streamed out. I didn’t want to waste the ink, I wanted to make something on the sheet, I remembered the school incident and how frustrated I had become with not being able to control. Uneasiness flooded me as I saw I had no control over the ink, it kept flowing in thick and thin streams in all directions, I was desperate to control the patterns, but I could only let it go, let it take any form and grow into any shape. That would be what it is, without me doing anything. I felt empty now, as I let go and let be.
