The Pencil

I used a pencil to jot down stuff after a very long time.

It is a time warp for me in many situations, life at my parents’s and at my in-laws’s is vastly different. There are many things lying around here which evoke memories and long forgotten habits.

So I had to note down some items which needed to be bought from the market, when I saw a pen stand having many pens and a lone pencil. I took the pencil and started writing. Nothing seemed out-of-place, yet I felt I am going back to ‘those times’. At work, I have always used pens whenever the need arose, which was very minimal. I use the virtual notepads and stickies to write everything, from noting phone numbers, web links, even cash transactions, practically what needs to be written down.

Pencils were actively used during the high school exam preparations, practicing out pages and pages of biology sketches. Before that it was the mandatory art class, until primary where we would compare with each other which pencil would be darker. The main brands which we used were Nataraj and Apsara. There used to be one pencil with white background and flowers imprinted, it used to write very light, I am unable to recollect its name. Before sharpeners were common place, folks at my home used blades to carve out the graphite when the tip used to be broken. As kids, we would watch in fascination how under a matter of few minutes, mummy would sharpen out the lead. We were never given blades lest we cut our hands. But kids of which age have listened to their parents 😛 Brother and I had several under-the-cover sessions of blade and pencil, of which we were caught once and had a sound thrashing 😆

Ah, nostalgia…I like it when you strike 🙂

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The pencil which I am using now needs to be sharpened.

“MUMMY, where is the sharpener?”