At the threshold of beauty

 

With my Remington Rand in 1996 or so

A Remington Rand portable typewriter was my beloved companion for over a decade of my youth which was mostly wasted in the flighty hills of Shillong. Since I have already told the story of the waste in my memoir, Autumn Shadows, I shall not repeat it here. I sold the typewriter a day before I left Shillong without dreams. I sold it with the same self-loathing that Salinger’s Holden Caulfield had when he sold his typewriter just before running away from his school.

Delhi gave me dreams again, however. One of the first things I did in Delhi, as soon as I had enough money, was to buy a desktop computer. That was in 2001. One of the first poems I typed on it was about the WTC meltdown. The Gujarat riots would rattle my nerves a few months later.

My desktop which had a storage space of just 20 GB, much less than a common smartphone today, was meant to motivate me to continue writing which I used to do with my Remington Rand. The computer gave me a new life. I started blogging as soon as it arrived. I used to write for two local newspapers in Shillong and the typewriter was primarily meant for that. Writing kept me alive and kicking.

The Remington looked far cuter than my desktop which occupied an elephantine space. But typing on that cute little thing was a rather hard job. You needed to bang on the keys with all the strength you had. If an error occurred, you would spend minutes applying the Kores whitener and typing over it after waiting for the liquid to dry. One good thing is that the typewriter perfected my acquaintance with the keypad so much so that today my fingers fly on the gentle keypad of my laptop which occupies much less space than the Remington.

The desktop brought out the writer in me once again.  I started blogging. My first blog was The Way at Times blogs. It has now disappeared from the infinite spaces of virtual reality. When Times failed to give me readers, I migrated to Sulekha. Right wing fanatics didn’t let me write much there and I switched over to Wordpress which was eventually hacked and I found my place at Blogspot.

Thanks to my readers for this rank

I cannot live without reading and writing. Literature is the essence of life for me. Literature takes one to the threshold of the beauty of existence. I read great writers. I try my best to write good stuff like them. But I’m aware of my limitations. Nevertheless, I’m happy I have reached the threshold of beauty. I live there, at the threshold of beauty. I will enter it one day, I know. I will disappear into that seductive world of ethereal beauty one day. I’m waiting. Waiting in the autumn of a time that began with the Remington typewriter and has arrived at the current HP laptop.