The leap of faith from pencil to ink pen was never going to be easy and we did it our way! We battled our way through smudgy ink pens, tippled ink pots, uniform stains and broken nibs!
It had been an anxious moment when the class teacher had announced on the very first day of Grade 6 that we had to say goodbye to using pencils. Everyone already knew what lay ahead. We had seen our elder siblings/ cousins/ seniors use those shiny ink pens. They looked and smelled funny and even today, after all these years, the memory of an ink pen engulfs the mind with its distinct smell, the purplish blue pages and the round, fat Camlin inkpots of glass.
Ink pens changed our lives. We felt grown up. The pencil-scribbled notebooks of younger students now elicited smug smiles and a feeling of being older. Our parents bought these pens for us and they were handed over to us with much fanfare. The classic Hero fountain pen was now our new companion. Blue and black Camlin inkpots were bought.
Even today, the memories of our first experiences with the ink pen are fresh!
1. With the ink pen, we had to be more responsible. Each day, another ritual was added to the school day. This would involve waking up slightly earlier and refilling the ink pens. For protection, yesterday’s newspaper would be kept on the dining/coffee table and the pen was refilled. It would always be yesterday’s newspaper and not today’s, else it would draw a huge scolding – the spill on the freshly delivered newspaper.
2. The feeling of horror on days when we forgot to refill our ink pens. This would be further exacerbated if our friends were not carrying an extra pen. We tried and failed miserably to shield the pencil in our hand from the prying eyes of the teacher, who would shake their head and remind us (“for our own good”) to be more meticulous.
3. The war-like situation at home when we came back with our school uniform dotted with ink stains. As we changed our uniform behind closed doors, mom would begin a tough line of questioning to figure out how we got the big stain on our uniform. Generally, the scolding given would be less severe if the stain was partly someone else’s fault.
4. How can we forget the broken nibs? Hurried writing or a slight application of extra pressure meant that the nib would break with a blunt breaking sound. This was probably our first experience in disaster management and it is funny to think how we would frantically reach out for paper scraps to stem the flow of ink and save our notebook in time. Sometimes, innocent handkerchiefs had to be sacrificed for the cause too. And some of us would clean the ink residue on the pen on our hair! Broken nibs also meant new pens and this would always make us happy secretly.
Mobiles, tabs, and laptops may now rule our lives, but the ink pen still holds a special place in our hearts, like the adamant stains it left behind on our uniforms.
