I am a writer.
Wait.
Let me amend that.
I write, sometimes. Mostly, I do not. What does that make me? A writing enthusiast? A word connoisseur? A timepass Wordsworth? Or maybe someone with the attention span of a seven-year-old who is stepping inside a narrow, dimly lit shop full of toys, trinkets, shiny plastic figurines of all colours and sizes stacked on top of each other four times his height. Where was I?
I am a writer. Am I a writer? I certainly do not see myself sharing similar adjectives with Arthur Conan Doyle or Joseph Heller or heck, even Chetan Bhagat. Thinking about this, makes writing, this task of jotting down dark lines and curves into a recognisable form that elicits meaning in other people’s minds, a much more formidable task. It becomes a square circle, a wet drought, an intelligent Zack Snyder film. It becomes a certain impossibility.
A few weeks ago, a man rang our doorbell. His skin was deeply tanned. At about 5 feet 2 inches, this scrawny man was almost a full foot shorter than me, yet there was certain defiance in his eyes that led me to believe that he could beat me in a fistfight. Thankfully, he was just there to inform us that he and his crew would be cleaning the water tank the next day, so there would be no water from 9 am to 7 pm. My mother was annoyed at this new development that threatened to throw her deliberate, devised daily routine in a mess. So, I tried to set up a different date or time for this.
Instantly vexed, he replied in his thick Marathi accent “Apan ko bass tanki saaf karne ka hai boss, neeche matti jam jaati hai”(I just need to clean out the water tank, it gets muddy.) and promptly left.
And so I planned to wake up early the next morning, switched off the television and diligently set an alarm for 8 in the morning. When I reached for my phone the next morning, it read 9:57 am. I had set the alarm for 8 pm.
Apprehensive and tense, armed with a newspaper, I marched towards the washroom and turned on the tap with mutinous optimism. Lo and behold, there was water in the pipes.
Inspirations themselves are inspiring and fills you with hope. They seemingly appear out of nowhere and leave you with a false sense of comfort and security.
“The building has about 15 floors. Each floor is about 3 meters in height. 45 meters. The pipes are like 0.2 meters thick. Pi radius squared into height. Makes it about 1.4 meters cubed. 1000L for 1-meter-cube. Goddamn, that's like 1400 litres of water”, I thought to myself. How silly of any of us to be concerned. The water will certainly last for a day or two. Easy.
My second trip to the washroom was full of its own hurdles and uncertainties. The tap croaked when I opened it. A thin stream of water trickled out. I did not anticipate that the people in the other apartments would also share my optimism and pragmatism. I did not fret much. All I had to do was wait till 7 pm.
I constantly find excuses not to write. I am busy. I have a test. I have a project. It is too noisy right now. It is eerily quiet now. I grift myself with much ease.
Finally, at 7 pm, a siren rang loud and clear. The cleaning had been completed. I waltzed to the sink and opened the tap. My semester is now over. The hour of the night has taken away all the ruckus of the household with it, leaving only elaborate truck sirens that blared by. Everything is now in order. The con is up.
The tap croaked once more as water oozed out of the tap. A pointer blinks on my screen as words begin to flow. But something is amiss.
The water is brown and muddy. It smells foul. The stream of water grows thicker and stronger. The light brown is almost black now. I look up from the monitor to see what I have written. Quite succinctly, it is awful. It is basic, bad, banal, boring. It had been 8 minutes since the tap had been running. Something must have gone horribly wrong during the cleanup. Sitting at night, in the light of the monitor, I can only wonder. Maybe the water had already been kind of muddy and I had not noticed. This “cleanup” probably just made something worse. He never should have cleaned the tank in the first place.
A loud cough and a gargle from the tap shook me straight from my thoughts. The stream of water grew exponentially stronger and changed its colour once again, now transparent. To answer the question, I posed earlier; What is worse than half a doughnut? No doughnut at all.
All I needed to do was be patient and keep the tap running. The sludge and grime will take care of itself.
I think I will write more often now. It does not matter if it's the foulest smelling sludge and grime. I got to trust in what the man said,
“Apan ko bass tanki saaf karne ka hai boss.”
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