Writers Jam

It’s Sunday and I am back at my bookshelf, armed with the least sorry looking, (old favorite tshirt) cleaning rag at my disposal. Post-shifting the remaining bits and bobs stare from the corner. It’s quite obvious by just a cursory glance that I come from a long line of pesky, bookish hoarders. Here,

• An marine biology tome from the 1970s sits below a cookbook with fish curry recipes, fearing for its life.
• Disney princesses on notebook labels flirt shyly with MS Dhoni over there on the exam pad.
• Windows 98 installation guides smoke a solemn cigarette with yearly planners still in their plastic casings.
• Appa’s stamp collections get their spines sewn back together by Amma’s tailoring samples collections.

In the midst of all this, there’s a box with the most tantalising distraction ever known to man. Nostalgia. Inside, there are:

• the collections of bad poetry I wrote at 15. Under the covers, in a hungered daze of feeling like the World’s Most Tortured Soul.
• tiny drawings of tiny parents with comically tinier kids, all adorned with crowns for some reason, made by: tiny not-motor-coordinated hands.
• test papers, essays turned in, and report cards that speak of someone on the way to conquer the world with her ideas.
• diary entries with scathing, white-hot Rage, pulsing and festering on the pages when the world slipped out of her (not-so-tiny) hands.

In a sense, I’ve been tasked as the sole purveyor of my family’s literary memory. Silverfish in vintage phonebooks leave a trail of cutout poetry; Old family friends and faceless birthdays. Elder cousins of yore leave helpful notes, (not-so-helpful) doodles, and inside jokes alongside the margins of perpetually underlined and highlighted, hand-me-down history books. Countless people weave in and swarm this corner, clamouring; For bits of their history to be screamed (or whispered) at the viewer.

With every passing week, I see the owners of these pages sift through my memories, pouring my experiences into the Collective River of Shared Epiphanies and onto the Shifting Dunes of Time. And with every passing week, I see the ( formerly yellow t-shirt ) rag blossom into the drab greys characteristic of this stage in its life cycle.