typewriter blues

Wake up, slam your palm on the electrical clock with its laser-like digits and curse the beeping sound that created a homicidal robot dog in your dream. Promise yourself that you’ll get a new old-fashioned alarm clock, the kind that puts you to sleep with its gentle ticking to replace this glaring, gleaming plastic monster.
Get ready and check your e-mail. Read the newspaper; maybe get into the habit of just calling it the news. Look away from the screen and remember the times when you would hold those large sheets of paper that rustled in your hands as you read about the world. Feel nostalgic and imagine how you’ll be explaining the concept of a newspaper to children, twenty years from now.
Finish up with classes and get almost magnetically drawn to your computer screen. Check your e-mail again and then Facebook. Think about deactivating your Facebook account. Shy away from doing it. Then, one day, take a deep breath, click on the Deactivate Account link and go through the confirmations and be Facebook-less. Two, maybe three weeks later return from the edge of suicide because of boredom and reactivate your account. Look heaven-wards and thank the gods of technology for saving all your account information and realise that you are but a slave to this machine that stares at you, unblinking.
Stumble upon your small collection of letters and browse through them. Relive the feeling of receiving a letter from your friend, who lives across the world, over summer and realise how much longer you’ll remember the two letters you got even though you got an e-mail almost every other day. Re-read the only letter your father ever sent you, the only time, you think, he actually spoke to you and how he wrote that he wished that telephones and the internet weren’t invented so that people still wrote. Make a mental note, promising yourself that you’ll write to him tomorrow and then forget about it because you sent an e-mail later that night.
Let your mind wander back to the day you were leaving home to travel across the world to receive an education and remember the odd, blue bag that lay on your bed and the surprise as you opened it to reveal a small, portable typewriter. Fish the bag out from the abyss under your bed and set it up on your table, pushing aside the sleek laptop from its place, place a sheet of paper in the typewriter and punch, punch, punch, let the words flow out of you, lend the words a part of yourself, sculpt, chisel, imagine yourself as Michelangelo, invest your entire being to create a piece of art to reflect your passion for writing, punch the wrong letter, grab the whitener and try to undo the mistake, muse on how the typewriter teaches you that mistakes can never just be deleted by tapping a key, breather, put the paper back in and punch, punch, punch, stop thinking, stop breathing, block out the music that your roommate’s iPod is churning out, punch, punch…and look up as your friend walks in and asks you why you can’t be normal and use Microsoft Word like everyone else.

kaleidoscope

The plane descends slowly down towards the city that is supposed to be my home. I can see a shining clump of neon lights, something out of the dream of a child obsessed with sci-fi stories. As the plane hovers over the airport, probably awaiting clearance, waiting for another plane just like itself, carrying people who look the same and think the same way, I feel sick. Not physically sick or anything – just plain queasy in the head or something. I already miss college, what I now consider home, or will, at least for the next few years. I’m apprehensive about meeting my family after these few months. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I wonder if the internet connection at home is up and running – I need to stay in touch with my friends.
When I’m not in Calcutta I think of it as home and when I am there home seems to be elsewhere. I am not sure what home is and so I come up with definitions that sound good but don’t make much sense:
Home is a feeling.
or
Home is a group of people around whom one’s comfortable.
or
Home is a time, not a place.
I calm myself and tell myself I am just going through a phase of self-discovery. I figure that it’s about the right time for that. At least that’s what I understood from all the books I’ve read or the movies I’ve watched or from all the music that blares from speakers everywhere I go.
I am a global nomad, I say. I think I read that somewhere.
I’m just sick of the way people are – if Holden Caulfield did it so should I.
I need to go find the answer to life, maybe walk on the razor’s edge.
And then I see myself in a mirror as I walk towards the arrivals wing and I see how similar I am to everyone else who’s walking by and how similar, in fact, everyone is. Everyone has a cell phone, an iPod, everyone wears the same kind of clothing, everyone is humming the same tune, how little everyone notices of what’s around them. I am a child of technology. I am not raw feelings and emotion – I am neurons and electrical signals. I am a global nomad who is searching for a home. I wander aimlessly in the midst of throngs of people who have been rendered perfectly alike and are unable to recognise themselves because they see their own face in the face that walks past on a crowded street. I am not a piece of art or a glittering amalgamation of magical potential; I am an iPod or a car that has so many features that most of them are completely useless. I am defined by everyone around me and they, in turn, are defined by me, and because we have none to tell us what is right have become the generation that can’t know its own name. That is also why I am mass of gibberish when faced with describing myself. I am not the living breathing creature that I should be – I am a random mixture of figments of other people’s imaginations.

father and son

Before reaching the age of ten, most boys want to grow up and be like their father. Struggling through the myriad small complications that come up during their everyday lives they wish for time to pass quickly so that they can be big and strong like father, able to do what they want, able to drive, to shave everyday, to tell stories about their days at school and college, or at least that’s what I wanted when I was a little boy.
As I waited for my father to return from work, for the piercing whistle that would ring out as soon as he entered the house, I would think of things to tell him and would plan the couple of hours when he would be free to play any game I asked him to play.
Playing chess – that is one of the first things that my father taught me. Although I don’t play it anymore, the evenings when I sat with my father and tried to understand the nuances of this odd looking game are some of my favourite childhood memories.
“The demon-king of Sri Lanka was a very good chess player. He was one of the first people in the world to play it,” my father told me one day.
“But he was evil so why do we also play it?”
“He was evil but very intelligent and hard-working and also religious. He was one of the smartest men in the world.”
That lead us into discussions about good and evil and God and religion and the supernatural. The things we talked about I cannot remember anymore but I remember talking about them and those evenings were a few of the last times when my father and I really spoke, our respective quiet natures not allowing us to connect once the innocence and enthusiasm of childhood left me.
As of today if I had to choose a way to spend time with my father it would be over that intriguing chequered, black and white board, where tiny figures take up enormous dimensions, where kings are killed and wars won or lost because of one knight’s bravery, those tiny paths that I walked along when my father was twice as tall as I and from where I would look up and try to understand what it means to be big.