“Impossible is possible”, this was the line scribbled alongside a quirky remark about life and girlfriends and how they both sucked and an almost defaced, probably by a jealous lover “Kiran loves Shobhana”, there were several others as well love notes, phone numbers and lots of names, all scribbled across the desk I was sitting. The drudgery of endless classes and lectures could transform a simple student into an artist, I wondered as I thought about the school days when almost each of us wrote our names as well as the name of the girl we had a crush on, all inside a tinny weenie heart across each and every desk in the class, perhaps we thought scribbling or engraving our name across the desk would reserve for us a place somewhere in the memories of people, it was like immortality was just a stroke of scissor away. I as a matter of fact never got to do that because I always had a strong predilection towards falling in love with the girl sitting next to me and writing her name alongside mine, much more than tacky felt dangerous because what if the girl read it and complaint to the teacher. So more often than all through the childhood and as well as a greater part of adulthood, my love went unrequited more so because of my propensity of losing the people whom I loved the most in life and partly because I feel love is about happiness and keeping your beloved happy and I think people are happy without me being a part of their lives. Our class room desk weren’t the only place where this war for immortality was being fought because all we needed was a pen or a compass and then almost every empty wall felt like an empty canvas waiting for our master touch, so even the walls of our school toilet were filled with endless testaments about an undying love to an extent that my school people have to tile the restroom walls ceiling to floor but who so ever came up with that idea perhaps has never heard of a thing known as permanent marker and pretty soon the walls were once again painted in black, red and green albeit this time it was the name of our principle along with vituperations in seven different languages that was scribbled to the depths of infamy.
When I was a kid I remember engraving, much to the dismay of my mother for I used her favorite scissors, the names of all my friends along the bark of our garden tree, the names are still there but that insouciance is now long gone leaving behind just a remembrance etched somewhere along the bends and corner of our minds. One place that I tried but could never leave my mark was the Delhi metro, compass, coins, scissors, nails or keys all redundant against god knows what resistant paint, though that didn’t stop us from using markers and crayons but the cleaning staff was so damn efficient that not even a single mark survived of our delinquencies but this summer while commuting I found the spot where my girlfriend once scribbled our names in the space between the backrest of the seat and the compartment walls. The heart and the name was all effaced like the last remnant of our relationship and as I ran my hand across the emptiness where once her name had been, I wished for a worm hole to suck and take me to the time when we sitting huddled together have tried to immortalize our love, one thing for sure that permanent marker was a damn good one for its ink after all this year’s refuses to fade at least from the tomb stone of my heart, something’s you just can’t leave behind especially the engravings and scribbling along our palms and forehead, itched by the treacherous hands of fate.
