Author’ Note:
What do you reckon when you see
this title, “This isn’t mine”? Yup! You've nailed it. This work does not belong to
me, in the context of plagiarism, but in a lighter tone, this was greatly
inspired from the work of Emma Donoghue’s The Room. I knew at the end of my
work, I never did a justice, even in the process of lifting her style of
writing. Perhaps it’s not fair (to compare!!!) to discuss such literary works
in mine. So, I leave it to my loyal readers to comment on my work. Entire work has
two parts (lullaby and requiem), which has contrasting tone (deliberate grammatical errors in lullaby part ) embedded to it and I
guess I've finally made a blog that is honest and close to my heart.
Lullaby:
This is how I sit, with my
pencil inside the mouth and my tongue tasting the juice of it. The paper in
front of me sits just like me, blank without a word, except my name on the top
of it, Saranya. I'm Saranya, who often finds trouble in getting her name
correct in the papers; so my amma came up with a brilliant idea of having it on
my writing pad for exams. That’s how I don’t have a red mark drawn across the
name by my miss. Now you can guess how stupid I'm and it will annoy you more if
you know that, I'm into my second grade now. Every day my miss asks me a
question, knowing that I don’t have an answer for her. She says, “I m good for
nothing”. Perhaps, she doesn’t know, what I m good at.
Now this paper is waiting for me
to write down the answer for the question,”Uses of trees”. It took me whole
evening to by heart the word ‘education’. The answer for this question has 11 lines (I always write it wrong- leven or elven!!!) and more words that are
longer than ‘education’. So I thought of doing something better than
remembering all those lines, so I drew pictures of trees and a sun in orange
color with crayons. I like crayons and colors that use water to mix, but my amma
screams at me when I get the color in the fingers and on my face. She says, if it
goes into my belly, I will fall ill and I need to see doctor uncle.
Doctor Uncle and his white place (everything
is white there, walls, table, his dress and even his hair) scares me, but he
gives me gems, every time I go there. I
always ask for the pink ones, because it makes my tongue pink in color. So my amma
got me color pencils, but I always use crayons to color my trees. I showed my
picture to my amma, she said trees shouldn’t be in blue color, but in TV they
showed blue trees. When I asked her about that, she asked to me to study for
the test. I was so sad that I had to take that long answer book again. I asked
God to make the answer very small for me, but it was the same and I started to
cry.
I don’t know why my tears taste
salty, when I asked my amma; she told me that God made it salty, so that we
won’t cry to taste it. I liked my tears
and I was hungry. I went to the kitchen to look for amma and I found her
cutting carrots. I put few of them in my mouth when she turned back.
“Don’t eat that without
washing them, it has germs”
“I’ll drink some
water after eating them, so that water will kill them in my belly. Amma! I m
hungry can I have dosa”
“You can’t have
dosa daily, kutty! I made upma today”
“I don’t like
upma, it sticks to my teeth and not sweet”
“You can have
upma in your new Mickey Mouse bowl”
Today I liked upma because it
was in my new bowl which had Mickey and Minnie Mouse stuck on it. Minnie Mouse
was coloring its lips with a red crayon. I know my mom has a similar crayon in
her table. I went to her room to get my lips colored, but I could not find it,
she must have hid it somewhere. Outside it was black with little white stars
all over the sky. Every day I tried to count them, I lose my count after 8. I
don’t like when the sky goes black, because amma puts me to sleep and when I
wake up, I have to go to school again. I m scared about the test tomorrow and
my friends who would laugh at me when I don’t know say an answer.
Amma says everything will be
good tomorrow, if I sleep, so I jump in to my bed and pull my covers. I go into
them and its dark, like the sky outside and now I remember the monster stories
told by my friend. So I hold my covers tightly so that monsters can’t get
inside them. Before the monsters came for me, my mom woke me up for the next
day’s school. With my eyes opened a little, I brushed, tasting the paste and
closed my Duckie’s (Duckie is my teddy bear) eyes when I was wearing my
uniform. Amma told me that I had games period after my test, which made me
happy and I smelled nice with Johnson baby powder.
The test paper was still waiting
for me to write. I prayed to God to put some words in it, I opened my eyes a
little while praying, to see if God was writing in my paper. He never liked me,
so he didn’t write. I want to write about my new Mickey Mouse bowl, but I don’t
know what to write. So, I drew the trees and the sun. My miss started to get
papers from every one, if she sees my paper, then she will show it to everyone.
All my friends will laugh and I’ll cry again. This time God heard my prayers by
the school bell, we all ran to the ground leaving our papers with her. Now its games
period and I m so happy.
Requiem:
Indeed it was a happy moment for
Saranya, because she never realized, that she would experience a monster in
reality. On the following day, Saranya was sodomized by her neighbor, in his
home. The next morning, Saranya woke up from a nightmare, panting with beads of
perspiration. She choked for words, to describe what her neighbor did to her.
It was learnt that, the guy let her off, after the poor girl started to vomit.
The poor girl was lured with biscuits by her neighbor. She failed to
see the sickness that was staring at her, in the name of cream biscuits. The
little girl, who loved to paint, is now getting treated in a hospital, after
which she has to undergo counseling sessions to get over her trauma. I’m not
sure, if she would love gems again or watch stars in a cloudless night without
any atavistic fears blinding her.
The lullaby part was a pure fiction of mine based on Saranya’s
interests, as told by her mother. This was penned down out of spite, to
showcase the disruption of a childhood. I don’t want to plead on the need for
draconian laws, which in no way is going to bring Saranya’s lost dreams. She
will never feel safe anywhere, having been destroyed at the hands, which were once
considered haven. Now she sleeps in a hospital with her knees close to her
small chest, breathing heavily and fear embracing her inside of a teddy bear.
