In school we had to answer the question: "What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?". We wrote our answers down on this A4 sized manila card which tracked your answer every year.
I always wrote the same thing. "Penulis". Writer.
I never thought twice about it.
And yet I had never really written down anything (you keep hearing about various authors who start writing in diapers etc etc) except an ill-conceived poem about the wind (it always blew) when I was about 5 or 6.
My stories were in my head. In it I spun confident yarns, juggling several at one time, occasionally trying out dialogue aloud.
When asked to baby-sit various cousins little-r than myself, I would try out these yarns on them. They listened wide-eyed and fell asleep only when the tale was done and with promises of more tomorrow.
And still every year I wrote Writer on the manila card.
The parental units, of course, were off on a frolic of their own, envisioning other professions for me (I doubt I ever told them what I wrote on that manila card).
Professions, which, as I grew up and shed my dreams one by one I began to take as my own ambitions.
But yet through it all I wrote "Writer". Year in. Year out. A mantra
Of course, I wrote little pieces here and there.
In fact until I went to Law School, my essays (in whatever language) garnered the requisite As.
But never a story, never anything of consequence.
My parents, however, did cotton on to my talents and utilised me to write important greeting cards or letters to the huge extended family that spanned the globe and filled me with trepidation with their criticisms and comments.
Once, after having read a greeting I had written to the woman who raised my mother, my father turned to me and looked at me with eyes filled with wonder, wonder that he had created this creature who could make words sing.
You, though, made me write.
Little stories. Little snippets.
I thought it was because you believed in me.
But it was more of the same really. The need to own me and control me. I guess deep down you always knew I was never really yours.
When the dust had settled and I had picked myself up, I checked and found no bones broken, all organs in place and a heart that beat steadily and surely as usual.
You and yours receded into the stuff of nightmares.
No biggie, I thought. I am whole. None the worse for wear.
But fixed is not unbroken. Something's got to give.
And sure enough, the words dried up.
In dribs and drabs, yes but soon everything became tawdry, even the stories in my head.
I welcomed the silence. Embraced it even. Tried to live outside myself for once.
But the emptiness within myself gnawed. Becoming a cavern in which all good things swirled and disappeared.
One day the head-stories came back. Bubbling out of me like a spring. Demanding to be written down. To be heard.
Of a man with a shock of white hair. Sitting in shadow. Telling the Warrior, God and Ghost that there were forces at work in this modern land of steel and stone. This land that he had built. The citizens had forgotten their roots. Chasing after holes in the sky and pieces of paper that certified your intelligence. He humbly (and he was not a humble man by any account) asked for their help.
Of two children. Walking hand in hand. Trudging a dusty path.
She said I was a dead weight around their necks, the boy whispers to his sister. That we were better off dead.
Its OK. His sister answers. We are going to where they love us.
She did not know that they would love only him and send her away.
Of a a great king who loved his queen so much he built her a mausoleum of marble. But he died a prisoner, blinded even of the sight of her tomb. Just because he had loved one son more than the other. One daughter more than the other.
Of four sisters. Named after Queens. One died young. Unmarried and childless. One died young with her husband and all her children around her. Another died old, in a foreign land having lived her whole life with a man who had loved her youngest sister, the most beautiful of them all who died young having forgiven the man who abandoned her.
But the words still refuse to sing
So I shush the stories in my head. I will tell your tales I promise them. Just let me sleep for now
Meanwhile I name myself after a desert and wait for the rain to come.
