The undue pressures of my life. Beneath this calm cool exterior, lies a storm-a-raging. Theres something about these kind of words. The ones with dashes between them or with ‘A’ between them. I mean they make no sense. Like ‘he came-a-running’. What has this conveyed to you. That he was having sex while running a marathon? Whats wrong with ‘he came running’. And this is the first example I come up with. So you know where this is headed.
Anyways, we were talking about undue pressures. My parents just went to rajasthan on a road trip. Yes, no pressure yet. They brought me back a t-shirt…yes, its pretty normal….and a notebook. And not the sundaram kinds, jispe brown cover chadaya, with your favorite wwf star and chalet bane. Yes, im from the era when it was WWF. And we used to say ‘EFFff’ with a vengence, like il give you a stunner just telling you about it. So anyways, it’s a notebook. Its somewhere between those yearly diaries that my dad had so many of, that he kept giving it to me.
That reminds me of something else. Theres this phase in everyone’s life when you start get 2nd hand objects from your father. Like they stop spending on you all together. Its like ‘ab to yeh apne pairon pe khada ho chukka hai’ types. This is probably the most useless phrase in hindi. Firstly, youre clearly mocking handicapped people. Yes, insensitive, I know.
So yeah, coming back to the 2nd hand gifts. Its like ‘beta….yeh pen lo’ and he holds out a black, scratched, chewed-on-the-back-end. I mask my disinterest and take it, avoiding his gaze. I come to my room, sit on my table. It’s a serious moment. I make my first attempt at opening it. I yank the cap. Doesn’t come off. I start unscrewing the pen and I know where this is headed. It’s the ‘return of the ink pen’. If there is something that had a profound effect on my childhood, in the negative sense, was the first time I started using an ink pen. I mean, you unscrew it, fill ink into it, write it at a certain angle till it becomes smooth and continue writing that way……. I honestly don’t know where im going with this.
So ya, this notebook. Its like this tome, with a leather cover, and believe me, a string to keep the book shut. A string. It reminded me of the movie ‘Jumanji’ and the game. I mean, what was happening there? Why couldn’t they just shut it. Anyways, I take this book, and as a habit, flip through it, as if something might be written in a notebook, that they just bought from a shop.
Oh man! That’s a great way of fucking around with people. Sometimes you have to go to these birthdays or parties where you don’t really want to go but you have to. Like , you don’t really want to buy a gift but you kind of have to. You know what you should do there? Get the wife’s name wrong. And don’t write who its from! That should provide some much needed badla.
I guess it’s a ‘second hand syndrome’. So ya, the book. I flip through the empty pages, and the pages are like real rough, as if made painstakingly by hand. Every single page in that notebook, made by some old guy with poor eyesight, sitting in a small room, making pages. So simply, judging a book by its cover, this is supposed to contain some awefully intellectual stuff. Now that’s the pressure I cant handle. I mean what I would normally do is open the first page, and on the top right corner, write my name in my best handwriting. Have you ever noticed that the first thing that a person does while checking a pen, is write their name? I go a step further and write ‘Karan is a good boy’. I mean how many of you have done that. This was the first thing that was common between me and my first girlfriend. We both, one evening , sheepishly confessed, sitting on a bench. And its always ‘Karan is a good boy’. Never ‘karan is a VERY good boy’. Its like I was always so content with mediocrity. So basically till date, ive never written anything in that book or even opened it again. The pressure’s just too much.
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