Enduring constant failures in trying to write something whilst suffering from the worst creative block one may ever see is an experience in itself. The failures do make up for some introspection, provoking me to look at the things around and makes me wonder if fixing my surrounding would help me finally get over “the big sad”. The clock should not be above my head but to the side so that I can get the time with just moving my head to the side instead of looking up saving me from constant neck pain, the table lamp should be on the right next to the pen holder so that the light is indirect and doesn’t cause much strain, the books on the left to be used as a coaster since reading requires effort and effort we are against, or whatever lazy argument I could make to feel even slightly productive again.
During one of many such incidents, where I try to make more sense of my surroundings, by rummaging through the items around me, I come across this ancient relic. Hidden like a true shinobi in plain sight, lies this beautiful dust-ridden black ink pot or as my Hindi teacher taught me “द से दवात”. To be fair, it is not even in sight directly but on the second last slab of the wall shelf but still, hidden for so long it feels it has been there long before I came into being. The insides of the ‘dawaat’ seems to be dried up (why was I expecting anything else?) and I could see the black solid mass inside, barely visible in the barely lit room. Still the ‘dawaat’ remains on the shelf, and gives me the excuse to skip another day’s work and wonder, the reasons to still have it here. Transporting the relic back to my desk, I twist my lamp’s neck to point at the pot and turn the bulb to it’s maximum, a self devised, homemade, portable operation table ready for yet another procrastination case, cutting open the keepsake, delving into the depths of the “what, why, how”.
All I could do now is speculate as to why this relic is still lying dormant on the shelf. There are a lot of maybe-s here. Maybe that the dawaat now holds significant emotional value, or at least enough to not be thrown away. Maybe, this is simply a reminder that pens were not always this easy to use and by extension, knowledge was not as easy to come across by, or perhaps a reminder that beauty requires class and work to be put in. Maybe you can’t relish your words and think before you write if you’re not putting effort into the equipment you’re writing with, a salient reminder that there are no shortcuts to revolutions. Maybe as a reminder of the hard limit, ensured by the limited ink of the pen, on the words you can write in one go, and the mistakes you can afford, making writing an extremely delicate task as it should be. A barrage of alternate timelines, each satisfying a different maybe hits me simultaneously as my eyes keep fixated on the black bottle. The darkness, at times, absorbs my thoughts completely, making the open top of the dawaat feel like a mini black hole that was kept sealed away from human sight and somehow I happened to have opened a pandora’s box. I can’t help but wonder if there was more to this dawaat that catches my eyes at first glance. What if there was a higher purpose it was serving by being kept on that shelf? There is always a chance the dried up ink can resurrect once again and preach the word of god; perhaps be the most active participant of a revolution, inscribe a manifesto, or even help overthrow a government. Or it might surface in a breaking news article in an ordinary daily newspaper, find its way into a speech that may echo through the world centuries after the speaker is gone, jump into a song lyric, a best selling novel, a failed attempt at a poem or a letter that was never sent.
I wonder had the dawaat be full of consciousness and emotions and with a fear of death like the average human, would it be so calm and mysterious as it seems to be now? The black hole which seems to absorb all information, had it been the same or would it also be oozing out some form of hawking radiation in the hopes that someday some younger generation pilot cartridge or even a cheap refill might visit it and it would be able to pass on all it has seen to them. All the words it has seen been written and all the words that still stay bottled up inside it, wouldn’t it be satisfying if the dawaat could share it all? But I fear a simple dawaat wouldn’t stay relevant that long. Even if I step back and do not interfere in it’s final fate, someday someone would notice the dust ridden black glass bottle hiding in plain sight, like a true shinobi (or a kunoichi?), and decide on it’s pre-written fate. But I hope not all dawaats reach the same fate as this one. I hope someday a kid carries this द से दवात, runs back to their father in excitement, with another relic of the past with a golden nib, and the ink finally replenishes it’s thirst with water once again, and the dawaat resurrects once again, ready for another love letter, a poem, an article, perhaps even a story: A tale of the utterly gutsy shinobi, a fantasy wizarding world, a mother of dragons reclaiming her throne, a careful record of history or maybe the first words of yet another revolution.