The Story of Us

Average – someone who falls somewhere in the middle of the normal probability curve. It’s synonyms-ordinary, typical, mediocre, common.

People in general (on an average) don’t like being referred to as any of these words for there is a sense of nobodyness… a sense of just about anybodyness … a sense of failure, that is attached to these words.

He sat there, on a dark brown rexine sofa, that over the years had developed cracks and had taken on the appearance of parched earth, staring outside of the iron bars of the window at the branches of a mahogany tree, in his second floor apartment in Matunga. He had retired after serving forty years in the Bombay High court. Not too many responsibilities were waiting to be taken care of anymore…he did not have a wife, his children had grown up, he had educated them well, both were software engineers, married, one in San Francisco and the other in New Jersey, and then he had his pension coming in every month. It had been a month after his retirement and boredom was beginning to play its nasty tricks on him and that’s when he decided that he would finally do what he had always dreamt of doing – writing a book. And so there he sat , clad in a once white kurta pyjama, with pensive eyes behind Gandhi styled spectacles on his frail wrinkled face and a cigarette in his hand… staring outside of the window with his uncapped fountain pen and his notebook… waiting… waiting for inspiration.

He, like all first time writers, couldn’t figure what he wanted to write about. All the times in the past that he had thought of ideating for the book, that he was to write after his retirement, had convinced himself after a few failed attempts, that there was no point thinking about it. The idea needed to be fresh. How can an idea be lying around for years? It would get stale, boring and outdated. And well, if an idea is stale and boring…how could one want to write about it. He was clear …he did not want to do passionless writing. His writing had to have some punch to it! For now, whatever he had thought of so far seemed so trivial, boring and unoriginal. He was clear… his idea had to be different! And so he sat there staring outside of the window with his uncapped fountain pen and his notebook… waiting…waiting for an original idea.

In between, his mind would wander and he would wonder if there was a writer within him at all. He had never studied literature or journalism or any of those. The only thing he had written were notes in the form of fragmented statements for his court cases that only he could understand. How could he possibly (with the track record of the kind of notes he wrote) write well enough to make the readers understand exactly what he wanted to convey. He also wondered what ‘good’ writing meant…what kind of writing is it that people like to read. Like just about anybody else, he did not particularly enjoy negative criticism. And he knew for a fact, that there were a thousand critics out there waiting to pounce at and rape his book (probably the only one because he was already 62, diabetic and had a family history of Alzheimer’s) the moment it would be published. The very thought of the ratio of a 1000 critics to 1 book was stalling in more ways than one. And so he sat there, staring outside of the window with his uncapped fountain pen and his notebook … waiting… waiting for the fear of criticism and failure to disappear
There were moments of sheer frustration that gave rise to sporadic moments of strength, when he would decide not to think anymore. He would start writing… a word, a sentence and sometimes even a paragraph with lots of corrections. But words would just refuse to flow in a manner that they supposedly should for a good writer. Every time he re-read what he had written, a look of dissatisfaction would replace the one of anticipation and hope. The constant stitching and unstitching of his writing was disappointing him! He would just shrug his shoulders, tear the page out, crumple it, throw it in the direction of the trash can, readjust his glasses and start contemplating again.
It has been many years since his death now. Needless to say the book was never written. He spent his retirement staring outside of the window, fearing judgment, waiting for divine intervention, searching for the writer within, with his uncapped fountain pen and his notebook … waiting…just waiting. He lived a life of waiting, thinking, fearing and re-thinking without doing.