Mind Foraging

Why do you blog?

Amara stood in one corner of the room as her elder brother Mayin played their paternal grandfather’s old guitar. Grandfather loved to play the guitar in the evenings and had taken great care of it in his time, but now it remained abandoned in the house which had long lost its original owners.



The body of the guitar had started to wear off and its finish had started to fade. However, it was still in great shape from having been kept properly in its case.



“I didn’t know you could play guitar..” said Amara



Mayin kept playing while he looked at his sister with a smile, “am I any good at it?”



“You certainly have the potential to be a lot better,” Amara replied, “when did you learn to play it?”



Mayin stopped playing and looked at the curtains in front, trying to recall and then he spoke, “I used to watch grandpa play and he played really well. He was the one who introduced me to it. Then I tried my hand at it in school as well. So, that is how I learnt to play.”



“You should take this guitar back home. Everyone would love to hear you play,” Amara suggested



“I was thinking about it. Now, that you have said it, I think I will definitely take it,” Mayin responded



This house belonged to Mayin and Amara’s paternal grandparents. When their grandfather passed, their grandmother moved in with them and the house remained vacant except for the occasional cleaning visits. The house was a one-hour drive; Mayin and Amara had driven down to keep the belongings of their recently departed grandmother.



Mayin worked as a front office manager in a five-star hotel, while Amara was still in the first year of college.



Amara walked through the house, there was no smell of food being prepared by her grandmother in the kitchen anymore or her grandfather reading a book and smiling at her as she walked by. Life had become silent in a way she never thought it could be.



Amara entered her grandfather’s study room. It was dark except for the rays of afternoon Sun which entered from the gap between the two curtains.



Amara switched on the light and her eyes fell on the grandfather’s desk and chair. They were just like how he had left them. The old typewriter was sitting on the table covered in white cloth. It had become a kind of antique possession.



Amara pulled back the chair and sat down, resting her hands on the desk. Her grandfather was a news reporter in a prominent newspaper in the country. He is the reason Amara took up Mass Communication in her college. She always wanted to write and she wanted to be like a grandfather. However, the problem was that she was still waiting for that journalistic inspiration to rise and make her sit down to write articles of her own.



Amara’s grandmother was also good at writing. It was much later in life that Amara got to know that all those childhood stories that her grandmother told her were originally written by her. She even wrote down several poems, as a hobby of course. Amara’s grandmother was very much content with only her family and friends reading her writings and hence never got them published anywhere.



Amara opened the first drawer of the desk. It was full of some papers Amara thought were best not touched. In the second drawer were a few notebooks. One of the notebooks Amara identified at once. It was hers. She thought it was lost but here it was kept safely by her grandfather.



The notebook contained writings of Amara. Grandmother used to teach Amara English and to inculcate writing habits she would often ask Amara to write about everyday things. Each writing was written on a page or two, the topics were from everyday life- ‘Bus Ride to Zoo’, ‘Watching Movie with Grandpa’, ‘Learning to Ride Bicycle’ etc and they got better and better and the last ones were stories which Amara had written on her own.



Amara looked up at the photo of her grandmother on the wall and thought, ‘I love writing. However, it just might not be the kind grandfather wrote.’



“Found something interesting?” Mayin asked as he entered the room.



“Yes,” replied Amara, “I am going to go home and start writing. I am going to begin by writing blogs.”

Written by Anuran Chatterji

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