At 44, and on the threshold of 45, I have spent almost seventy per cent of my active life. However, I feel that I have still not written all that I could have in all these years. My writing has been in patches, inspired by an occasional gust of fresh air or by a thought provoking idea hidden somewhere among the maze of words in a newspaper or magazine.
I do not exactly remember when I wrote my first poem (did I ever write a poem?) or pen my first essay. What I remember,though,is that I was very fond of writing in my early days ----- just as I am today. Anything that made sense and could be expressed in the written form, found their rightful place in the innumerable notebooks and scrapbooks I had. They were letters to relatives and friends, school essays, stories for competitions, and even love letters ----- I wrote them all. What made me write confidently was not my vocabulary or writing skills ------- it was my father’s encouragement.
My father was a scientist; an ichthyologist to be precise. He was a teacher par excellence and a scholar of utmost dedication. While his students revered and adored him, his teachers egged him on in his quest for academic brilliance. My old man was a man of few words. He believed that words should not be wasted and should only be spoken or written when they made sense. Tutored by Englishmen and groomed in proper English medium schools all through his school and college life, my father’s English was impeccable. He knew each and every complex word that my schoolbooks were capable of throwing up. He constructed beautiful sentences with them to make me understand their exact meaning. Later, when I reproduced them, verbatim, his eyes shone with an intensity I had never seen before. The gratifying smile on his face told me that he derived immense satisfaction from all that was happening. The lessons went on and a time came when I had learnt to play around with the words and the syntax. He corrected whatever I wrote, never forgetting to post encouraging comments on my notebook.
Soon, I was doing well in my writing tasks. My spellings were never wrong, I could write proper sentences and tell the difference between croak and creak, neigh and whinny, and bust and burst. Little did I realise, then, that it was all because of that man. Today, as I try to write something worthwhile, his thoughts come pouring in with an unfathomable degree of spontaneity.
When Hamilton, our assistant headmaster’s Dalmatian, died all of a sudden on a
rainy day, he wept uncontrollably in class. We were in the fourth standard then and could not really understand why the Father cried so much. At the end of the class, he asked us to write a small obituary on the poor quadruped. The best essay would occupy its proud place on the school notice board. Although not many were enthused by the idea, I wrote down the name of the topic on my notebook, determined to do something about it. Students from all the classes were asked to write and it was going to be a difficult task to leave an impression. However, the thought of putting pen to paper on such an “important” topic made my heart pound. It was a make or break situation. With assistance from my father, I bid a small but emotional farewell to Hamilton through my 100-word write-up, which ultimately found a place on the board. I was ecstatic.
Subsequently, on numerous occasions, my essays written in class and on examination papers were the topic of discussion among schoolteachers and senior students. However, to my mind, I have never written anything as beautiful as that epitaph on Hamilton,even to this day.
