INFLUENCES II: PAIN

“Pain is to my intellect what daffodils were to Wordsworth.”

When girls my age were just about getting a grip on the intricacies of their 28-day cycle, I was engrossed in exploring the dimensions of trauma. Every time there was a death in my physical or filial vicinity, my cerebrum seemed to run overboard with ideas and tales. Almost like a spurt for me to stretch my imagination to the expanse of space. I remember doodling the above line around then in my little notebook. It seems to have stayed with me for a long time now. The book, as well.

Marriages are an excuse to practise your fighting instincts. Our (both mine and my sister’s) formative experiences in this regard conditioned us to the futility of the much-vaunted institution. Normalcy was a desired state in the household. The son was a brown-headed delinquent, the daughter an obstinate kid. No known vice could be traced in any of the parents, yet the ground appeared to be amiss between them. Consequently, the kids could sense themselves to be unlike their peers from mundanely non-volatile homes. A fact they seem to have handled adeptly at hindsight.

Looking back at those tempestuous times of childhood, what seems to have helped me endure them was Richmal Crompton. Author of the very popular William series, her books were the ultimate guffaw in irreverence. They were my refuge after a dorky day in school which would invariably be followed by a harrowing time or two in the school bus. School buses, I can tell from my feeble learning in sociology, are a counter-culture in themselves. Dominated by species like the hen/cock-pecked teachers, love-infested doves and the venom-sputtering rowdies, their brand of education is the opposite of how things are perceived in Indian classrooms. The last rows of seats are occupied by the enlightened ones – the ones who can concoct the most noise. You can expect ample whistles and comments from their kind as a response to fortuitous events like bullying of a newbie, nearby traffic snarls and the appearance of eye candy within a radius of 25 feet around the bus. The quieter ones, usually huddling around the front seats, are yet to see the light. They are yet to realise the fact that the only way in which to come out mentally unhurt from your school days is to croak about your life and its instalments in the bus.

Buses and their ordeal notwithstanding, events like these really got my neurons wringing. If something set me thinking, it invariably had gray shades to it. I can hardly recall sitting resolutely in some corner to myself whenever the sky was blue. Blue brought with it endless possibilities and a brimless reservoir of energy. It was only when the skies were overcast that I found the time to sit down and listen to the innate echo. One of the quirkier things of existence is that happiness of any kind is often too good to be expressed adequately. Misery, on the other hand, can be painted pretty effectively to the observer. Wordsworth has been doing that for ages now. And we are all the more gloomy because of that.