Scribbled

Tell us one thing you hope people say about you.

The school was engulfed in a different kind of atmosphere. The annual function was about to come in the preceding month. Some classes from the latter half of the school schedule had been made free for practise of various performances. The Saturdays had been specifically allotted for them. The school made sure all the students got the chance participate in the event, be it in the performances themselves or in organisation of the event.

I was part of a dance and dramatics performance; I had no part in dancing but in the act which accompanied the theme and music of the performance. Although some of my classmates were part of the performance, sadly none of my close friends in the school were part of it. There was time in between practises when we were free and I wasn’t a very talkative person back then, so I did what I usually did, took out my rough notebook and scribbled through it.

So many notebooks I have scribbled through making my favourite characters and sometimes even trying to make one of my own. I wasn’t any good at it but my imagination which was better than my drawing made it quite acceptable to me.

So, in one such moment where I was busy scribbling. My pencil escaped out of my hand despite the desperate attempt of my fingers to not let it go, accompanied by frantic movement of my other hand to stop it from falling off the table, but it did fall down to my left. That is when I realised someone was sitting next to me, a boy from another class.

How odd, how come I hadn’t noticed this presence next to me and most importantly why was he sitting here. Was he peeking at what I was doing? I looked up at his face and saw an expression of fear and uneasiness and after a few seconds of awkward silence he quickly got up and went back to his group of friends.

The group of friends was playing the game of truth and dare and that boy had been given the dare to sit next to me. But, wait a minute, why was it a dare? what was so daring about sitting next to me? I looked up at the group with these thoughts and faintly heard the boy speaking to others in the group, “I hope he is not angry with me. He did look kind of angry when he looked at me.”

I was bewildered, what was going on, why would someone be so worried about making me angry. I had never got into any fights or even had a heated verbal exchange at school, this was completely new to me. My habit of silently being lost in my thoughts and scribbling in my notebook had oddly created an impression that I was somehow an angry or very disturbed person. I still fail to imagine what they saw me as.

I never clarified to them that what they thought was very far from actuality of things. However now that I am writing this, I wonder if they think of school and recall the crazy angry boy drawing bizarre things in his notebook. If I meet one of them today I would surely ask him/her to describe this impression of me. It will surely be an oddly interesting conversation.

Written by Anuran Chatterji

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