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.