“Look onto
him – He is a weirdo and all the time looking at me with blank, scared eyes as
if I am going to eat him!” – This comment was made on a parent – teacher’s meet
of my school to my mother during my transition from class II to class III. The
comment from the class teacher at the age of six for the first time introduced
me to myself and I thought may be its true that a gigantic human being like my
late erstwhile class teacher can actually eat a lean, docile, numb school boy
like me. I also thought may be Nature has given her that power to eat me
up.
The
introduction was in the form of a reflection of another person about me to my
parent in front of me. This one statement created a plethora of self doubt
about my own identity about myself at a very early age. Later on, when I have
thought about it, I have felt privileged to receive such an identity labeler at
an early age as it helped me. In a way, that was the starting point of a
reflexive, immersive, self centric, narcissistic journey within me to actually
start searching myself through words, ideas, creativity, stories and plots. I
started to search stories about myself at an early stage because I started to
become doubtful about my existence at an early age of six when kids generally
enjoy the childhood. The self-absorption had to find out new ways of writing
through Bengali texts, alphabets, expressions, drawings, sketches, lyrical
rhyming (called Chhoras) and I will use them to self- hum a melody internally.
I created a whole new world for myself in my diaries in which I existed along
with my own characters in that world of my diary.
That world
was preserved in my little diaries (there were many of them) and often I was
creating those worlds of mine frequently when I was travelling in Lal Gola
Express to Krishnanagar or in Bidhan Express or Black Diamond Express to
Durgapur. Krishnanagar and Durgapur used to be my Mashi’s and Pishi’s house. A
movement in train to these places meant to me an entry into a whole new world
and not always like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I was always in tears when
after seven days I had to leave Krishnanagar (my Mashi’s daughter) or had to
leave Durgapur (my Pishi’s daughter) after a month. I was too vulnerable in
everything and everywhere at the same time. The moment I departed from my world
which was created in the train during the journeys’ to Krishnanagar, Durgapur
and I came back to Kolkata, I was in pain and more self immersed to write through
my diary pages. Often, my mom or whoever will accompany me in the train
journey, very un-harmfully wryly comment that – “Look onto our child author
with the diary pretending to be a thinker on the window side of LalGola
Express”.
But I was
not an author or never been an author for that matter. I was in my world of
vulnerability shaken with the crisis of existence and trying to find out a
meaning of self – absorptive expressions
through my diary pages. Many times, I will write gibberish lines like montage
of a sketchy draft for pages with no meaning of a plot or a story. But yes,
there was a story in each line of them. That practice still continues and my
journey of this crisis of existence still exists and has got more acute over
the years. With a larger crisis of existence, more story books of LUCY Trilogy,
Hema (The Measure of Central Tendency), Shapno (Pink Gender, Pink Gender
Extended) have been born. More characters are coming up every day. However, I am only running short of time in a
span of 24 hours. But the gibberish, chaotic expressions of music, academic
papers, journals, books are rising more everyday and more deviation from the
central tendencies are happening. But the future looks not to be gentle and
will only lead to more such characters even though a time of 24 hours will become short for not an Author
but an Expressionist with An Identity Crisis of Vulnerability.
Disclaimer: To be published in a magazine soon
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