White, serene and flawless it stared at me. I stared at it expressionless, impassionate and emotionless. We had some kind of discomfort between us. The sort that an ex-couple has when it runs into each other unexpectedly and then is left alone to “catch up” with each other. I looked at it like the man in the couple would look into the woman’s eyes and I think I felt like him too, “Oh! I love her so much! I don’t want to hurt her in anyway. I want to take care of her. Why didn’t it work? Will it work if we try again? Yes, we love each other. We won’t repeat our mistakes! Yes, I want to try.” And yet, as these emotions scoot through the man’s mind, he waits there speechless, at times motionless. It’s not as if there’s nothing to say. It’s just that saying anything is uncomfortable. It’s as if she already knows all he might say and he knows she doesn’t want him to say it. And he doesn’t say it because he doesn’t want to hurt her. I don’t know what women feel. I don’t know what it felt. Except in my case I was staring at an empty Word document.
I love writing. When I write I always like to type it out rather than write it down. Had it not been for computers, I would probably never have taken up writing as a hobby. I hadn’t written in a long time. I hadn’t met my love, my blank word documents which I fill with my thoughts all over them. Yet, when I opened one today, I didn’t want to spoil its white, flawless, serene look. I felt it was pure and my thoughts would spoil it. It looked so beautiful the way it was, innocent and calm. It wasn’t as if I didn’t want to write. I just didn’t want to spoil the Word document.
For some reason, I felt I must write on a yellow paper with a green felt pen. I didn’t have yellow paper and I didn’t have green pen. But I managed to find some old white paper which had yellowed by age and a red leaking pen which looked felt when I wrote with it. I sat down and wrote this on it:
Jack and Jill Went up the hill To fetch a pail of water…
I made sure I wrote it in as child-like, crude and bad hand writing as I could. Then I crumpled the paper, straightened it out again and I made doodles on it with different colored sketch pens. Then instead of throwing the paper away, I preserved it. I kept it in my drawer in as safe a place as I could.
I don’t know why I did what I did. My friends say I am good at expressing but this was a time I expressed without knowing what I was expressing. When I look back at it and ponder over what I did, I was probably searching for the child within me I lost years ago. Probably, I saw that child in the white flawless, innocent word document and I didn’t want to soil its mind with worries and thoughts of a grown up man. I wrote “Jack and Jill went up the hill…” because those are the first English words I remember ever having learned. When I learned to write them, I didn’t even know what they meant.
I’m a lawyer. I am to always think like a reasonable prudent man. When I look at the world around me, I realize there is no room for emotions in it. Harper Lee wrote, “Lawyers I think were children once!” True as it may be, can’t lawyers ever go back to being children? Do they always have to preserve yellow papers with doodles on them only in their drawers?
When i started writing it was more as a reaction to the confusions within me. I wrote because it helped me clear my mind and understand my own thoughts better. Then i set myself upon the task of improving my ability to express. I wanted to express better and better, clearer and clearer and that gave rise to the writer which you know.
Now, you may not have noticed that I haven't written a single thing since about 6 months! I don't know why, but i am just not confused enough about anything anymore. The way I look at it, probably there's a time when you try to fit in the world and people around you into fixed frames, in good and bad, right and wrong, black and white. As you grow up, you just realise one day that there're no such things. There're just greys and other shades.No one is good or bad, right or wrong. It just is the way it is and everyone stands wherever he does because he has to stand there. And you have to be and do what you think is right according to your conscience. This is the time your frames break and you let all your colors mix. You stop wondering whether the color that is formed is a rainbow or a dirty black formed from the mixture of all other colors. For last few days, I was very depressed. I thought it is dirty black. But may be now it is time to think it is a rainbow.
I hope you look at this from "rose colored" glasses and enjoy whatever is becoming of me.
