NOT BY ROTE

Some play sports. Some sing. Some recite poetry. Some play an instrument. Some play the fool. Me, I did none. Not even play the fool.

All I had was a nagging feeling.

When I heard a word I hadn’t ever heard before, able to derive only a portion of its significance from the sentence or context.

Or when I instinctively used a word for the first time, as yet only half sure of its actual meaning, glancing surreptitiously at the grown ups around alert for any out-of-place reaction.

It was always there, that nagging feeling, as I wrote my exams, struggling to select the best of the available alternatives to express myself. It wouldn’t ever go away.

Till one day, after a lazy theatre afternoon with too frugal a lunch and too much chai, inebriated by lofty discussions of the absurd and Foucault and Genet, of multi-textualism and Footsbarn that pen went to paper. There was no nagging feeling now. Just a clear outpouring.

The boy who could not even play the fool had begun to write.

HAPPINESS - a tribute to one of the finest

He is large. Every aspect of him. Unnaturally so. Hands hairy like hams each larger than a quarter pound of the butcher’s choicest. A mountain of a chest atop which sits a pebble of a head. In which, I suspect there is a pea of a brain. His arms in stark contrast are disproportionately thin, like the spindly branches of a Baobab sticking out from its massive trunk. I have never seen his legs, which are always shrouded in the mysterious lungi but his feet which peep out from beneath the folds of his regal robes truly defy imagination. They would almost certainly have bagged several ribbons at any of the garden shows, coming in far ahead of the more commonplace marrows, melons and pumpkins.

So doesn’t so much move as roll, a mode of locomotion somewhere in between the kite fish and the amoeba. And when he sits, its an elaborate symphony of joint and muscular co-ordination accompanied by surprisingly audible exhalations. In seated mode, his visage is not unlike that of an egg. Small rotund head, leading on to that flowing quadruple chin which cascades over this chest till it meets the large placid lake of his stomach, under which the rest of him resides. A laugh begins as a small tremor of the facial muscles, gradually spreads across his face till it engulfs his entire body, transfiguring it into a gently quivering mass. Utter even a syllable that is of interest to him and the pebble does a 360. From somewhere within the folds of the baobab trunk a spindly branch emerges and a short stubby finger pushes his glasses back from the tip of this nose. And speech is always accompanied by action, notable for considerable economy of movement. The spindly branches, if being frequently used to accent his diatribe, are restrained from retreating into the folds of the baobab trunk. Rather that remain perched at the confluence of the cascading chin and the stomach, wiggling this way and that according to the point being made.

The Terrifier and the Terrified

He towers in the doorway of the school hall. Impossibly huge. Rainwater streaming down his gabled shoulders. Taking off his helmet he asks a question.

Two hundred children shuddered in fright, kept silent for a while then broke out into spontaneous chatter, some of it, no doubt included references like Jack and the Beanstalk, Gulliver’s Travels and Seven at One Blow.

He asks the question again, his voice booming through the empty 3/4ths of the auditorium seeming to rattle the chinky wooden shutters. Like a roll of thunder it passed by and above all of us…. All the way back behind the last row where we never dared go for fear of what we may find.

There was not one from within our ranks with an answer.

Finally, she jumped up. Trembling, part with trepidation, part with fear of the unknown she made her way to the door as glee spread through the scholarly mob for she who towered over us was now being towered at. The terrifier was now being terrified. Fortunately the engagement did not last long and with a quick nod, he put his helmet back on and headed out.