Reasons for a Pragmatic Way to Approach the Blankness on the Wall

Mandira Pattnaik

I would be fending off some regular monkey attack atop a temple, or talking about common weather in the tropics, or bringing up some analogy between adults in their 20s and bikinis without borders if I was not ranting about how miserable the day was, how inappropriate a Twitter post, and then the moment, when away from those shadows, I’d be plucking rays to wreathe the sunshine.

Because, several things to write about. A wall and a fly and a cobweb. A nail clipper, a toothbrush, a tube of gum. All done, nothing dusted. Where the sons were before they went to school. Where the dirty linen waits to be washed. Where the broom rests and the floors gaze up to be combed clean. Where the spiders have abandoned dwellings for me to relegate.

Because, it feels to hammer a word (note: tbh, there’s an‘l’ missing—because I shouldn’t make myself obvious). I’d like to hammer the world, but I’ll settle for hammering a sentence to oblivion and onwards. Get lost. Or fix a fuse? (At least then I’d be useful.) But wait, a fuse was a poet’s muse. Don’t dampen it! Or, when I am at home, it’d seem I’m resting all day in bed. I’m fed, burp, low and lazy, and rising only when the husband comes from work, like a deeply welded, nay, wedded, miserable woman, who sits all day, or so it’d appear, and—wow—she at least warms dinner!

Because, it’s erratic, like a fragment—of a tale, of a memoir, and there’ll be pictures tucked away in family albums to write about, a tsunami of remembrances, if I’m not listening to, absent-minded, to an annoying verbal storm beamed live on TV and called a debate, but it’ll be one edgy and edge-less essay, a tale about the French in the sunshine, or how their Prime Minister Manuel Valls argued that naked breasts (pointing to Marianne, a symbol of France) were more representative of France than a headscarf; and like Providence, I’d be watching a couple dancing with the Eiffel Tower in the background from a video YouTube recommended, when, curtains drawn, I’m bored in the afternoon.

Because, it may soon be about things that mattered, things that refuse to die, things I refuse to bury, or something that was lost, maybe or maybe not about why I planted what-I-did in the backyard this spring morning, or the glacier that’s melting in a picture in the newspaper, about the coriander I washed in the sink—the injuries I’ll inflict on another (isn’t that obvious, with due apologies) by some collage of thoughts, masquerading like an unknown gravitas.