good days

Suddenly I have a bit of free time. So I've been doing some amount of writing of late. It's nice to get it out on paper. I write in long hand. Much better feel. I love to write on those small secretary pads, many of which I hoard from different training programs and tutorials I attend. I write with pencil now, but my favorite writing instrument is the ink pen. The smooth flow of a nice ink pen, the kind you open the cartridge and pour in ink into. The pens themselves used to be badly built in India. They leaked all the time and left dark ink stains on the forefinger and thumb. Sometimes the skin used to wrinkle up from so much ink. Every few months the nib on my ink pen would give out, and I used to walk up the road to the Kadma market to buy a new one. Jana Stores had the best selection in my area.

I loved the inky smell of my right hand. I used to sit with my hand dipped into a mug of water, just to watch little blue florets of ink that blossomed.

I find it easier to write in first person, because most of what I write is from my own experiences. My brother warns me if I have to keep writing from my own experiences, the well will run dry sooner or later. Agreed, but all art stems from experience, and there's a little bit of ourselves in everything we write. Of course, we're talking about different things here, my bro and I.

This is how my world is structured. The Big Five. My mom, dad, brother, sister and my husband - they're the original big five. My daughter is the love of my life, but only after my mother. I still don't classify her with the other five. She's a different class altogether. A different kind of love. Once I asked my mother who she loved most in the world. She gave me an ordered list. First came her mother. Then her children, and then her husband. I was jealous that I only came second, but a corner of my heart was happy I'd beaten my father to second place.

Yes, "childhood is the bank account we draw on for the rest of our lives". I don't know who said this, but it was a writer featured in the collection of stories, Treasury, that we were tested on in 10th standard. Look at me - revisiting childhood and all - I'm old enough to have a bank account and to draw from it.

As an aside - does any one know if you put up a story in a blog, is that counted as publishing the story? Just curious.