Notes on a pen

There is some thing so romantic, so sensuous about a much loved pen. It's weight resting ready against the middle finger. Its thorax indented by the tight embrace of relentless digits that held it in the tight grip of passionate inspiration until the fingers themselves changed and grew callused grooves to fit. Its nib  gathers to a point the  suspense ridden trepidation that kept it hovering a full minute above the page before descending with a reckless or defeated sigh on the pristine smoothness of page. The smooth body holds the remembered warmth of pursed lips pressed to it in thoughtful contemplation, It carries the scars of feverish bite marks left behind by a particularly meaty idea that needed to be wrestled into submission. The stains of sweaty fingerprints from punishing examinations cling to it's glossy skin.  It is almost a living thing -- this carrier of memories .Witness to the words let fly, held back and the ones that ought to have been. And just like the human being, a pen too has character.

I think it all began with the period films- the Victorian men and women scribbling away furiously on creamy parchment, the elegant plumes of their quills executing a scratchy flurry of pirouettes.
I used to fill obsolete notebooks with scribbles just to watch the long wand of my pen dance and sway over the page. And then there was my grandfather with his beautiful handwriting sloping across lines in a smooth glide.Whether ball pens or ink pens, his pens were meticulously maintained and treated with utmost respect. I still remember the battered beloved stic pen he was using on the day he passed away.

My grandmother was an inveterate writer. Letters, stories, lists, notes, asides, all dashed away in the pale blue of her favored ink. She was the one to introduce me to fiction; pushing a battered but beautiful copy of hardbound Jane Eyre into my eight year old hands.  And then having spirited discussions on the characters and plot line. She also started me off on the artistry of writing with her innocent yarns about cousins hunting down a missing pair of spectacles all written in her sweeping cursive over sheets of rough unruled paper.  She was the one who unwittingly introduced me to  the dignified but sweet-natured Hero pen which started me off on my love affair with fountain pens.

Have  you ever noticed that when you use someone else's pen, your handwriting becomes a little like theirs? The weft and warp of your knit cursive adopts the slants and curves of the predecessor. The sweep of the inked letter seems to call back for the familiar hand, putting our upstart penmanship back in its place. The pen can't let go as fast as the fingers that grew cold without them. And so, one sunny afternoon you collide with a sheaf of letters penned in a beloved hand and realise that your hand is not the same anymore. It is stained with the indelible ink of memory and love, seeping under the callused epidermis to color the canvas of your character.

Pens aggravate. They break when you least expect it and break your heart with it. Run out of ink at the worst time possible. Leak all over your hand, ruining anything in the path of its outburst. They become inconsistent and boorish leaving you no choice but to let go. They make you fall in love with their smoothness and leave you wanting when you realise it is an understocked/limited edition piece. But pens console too. They let you weep out your frustration in jet black spurts of hurt or in a long stream of unchecked eulogy. The comforting friction of  nib on page eases the ache within, letting it flow out your fingers. The careful ritual of cleaning, refilling and drying that aged fountain pen is a mode of meditation of what is, was and will be. It mandates deliberation, checks the excess, crafts the thought. The pen demands that you give what you write enough room to breathe and give yourself time. And most importantly, the pen marks the journey that your writing took-- it shows the checks, corrections, the blotches, the over indulgence in metaphor and adjective that you had to scrap. Contrarily, if you have chosen to put something down in irretrievable ink, it must be that special. My paternal grandfather always used any random stub of pencil, or an errant ball pen for his everyday businesses. It was only years after his death, that a vintage Sheaffer fountain pen was retrieved from the safe, secret place in his back drawer protected from the mundane scrawl of habit.

Animism holds that an inanimate object can carry a spiritual fingerprint, a soul if you will. Or perhaps, I am entirely too enamored with the written word and the vehicle that carries it. In either case, I have learnt too much from pens and their lovers to ever take them for granted. It's a special thing to be able to love an inanimate object minus the materialistic edge, to endow it with a spirit beyond it's wood, steel or plastic bodies. Especially for an observer whose major preoccupation is deciphering human attachments. But then again, there is nothing that can't be given a deeper meaning-- something an old faulty pen, found in a back drawer along with moldy papers taught me.