La Mitad Extranjera

A little girl of 5 walks into her new class room ‘Standard I- Section A’. Just like Ishaan Awasti in Taare Zameen Par, she has shifted to this new school in the middle of the term. A teacher appears and asks the class to copy the contents on the board. This little girl had a slate but didn’t have anything to write with. She is embarrassed to ask for a chalk piece. She thinks it will be humiliating to ask for a chalk piece. She walks over to her teacher and asks for a pencil. The teacher laughs and asks her, “what do you use to write on a slate? A pencil or chalk?” The little girl now humbly replies chalk. She borrows a chalk from another boy. The boy tells her that she has to return his chalk the next day because it’s special. As you would have guessed, the little girl is me.

Second Standard: I move to a new school. One day, I forget to take my pencil box to school and I borrow a pencil from my neighbour. If you know me well, you would have guessed what happened next. I lost her pencil. Everyday, she would let me know the height of the pencil I lost. The height kept on increasing day by day and one day it eventually reached double the height of a normal pencil. I never returned any pencil to her and years later this courageous little neighbour who lost her pencil to me became my classmate once again during my post graduation.

Third Standard: Nothing great happened.

In the middle of my fourth grade was an excitement that conquered every individual in the class.. Upgrading from Pencil to Pen. This post is about my fantasies for pens I’ve admired and used.

The first pen I admired was a bright red coloured, ink pen which my dad bought for my fourth grade annual exams. I loved the smooth nib and the glossy feel while writing with that pen. I tried very hard to buy a similar pen in later years. Unfortunately I didn’t get one like that till this day.

In my fifth standard, I’ve seen the best use of pen on April Fool’s day. Students frantically staining each other’s uniform with red and blue ink. I didn’t develop a fantasy for pens until my teenage. Before that, Pens meant ink stained hands, ink stained notebooks and ink spilling over pencil boxes because of shaky auto-rickshaw travels.

All of a sudden I started buying new pens. Hero pens and colorful pens which do not write very smooth after 2 days of me using them. A white hero pen with an art on it which was admired by everyone and as usual became a museum piece in a week. I soon became a regular customer of nearby stationary shops. I bought pens with so many designs. Zebra skin styled pens, tiger skin style pens, pens with lots of mickey mouse images and sometimes with fishes.. When quality came into picture, I shifted to pilot pens.

From my high school, I stopped using ink pens because my brother humiliated me saying I haven’t grown up because I was using a ink pen. My favorite pens during high school days were Uniball eye and Zebra which was smooth while writing and had a sleek and stylish look. They lacked funky animal/cartoon designs. In my college days I was a big fan of Cello Pointec gel pens which also gave me a smooth writing feel. I also had the fattest pen which was a gift from my aunt. It had both funky look and smoothness while writing.

I would associate 3 qualities to buying a pen. 1) Looks: Funky or Sleek and Stylish 2) It should write smooth and have excellent quality and 3) Brand name.

Despite trying out so many pens all these years, my hand-writing has been steadily bad. Talking about my bad handwriting, I can recall an incident during my class 5 mid-term holidays. In one of my dad’s attempts to make my handwriting look good, he made me write a to z in cursive writing. I was disappointed, for all my cousins were playing and me writing a,b,c. One of them looked into what I was doing and teased me for learning a,b,c at class 5. That was Master.Vinodh Balaji when he was 11. Some people never grow up. He still does the same, trying to peep into my desktop to find out what I’m writing.