RANDOM THOUGHTS

It’s been a while since I last wrote…. Of anything personal, anything that wasn’t newsworthy…save the diary I’ve started keeping this year. This seems a good place to start.....when the fancy catches me!

When I was 10 my dad gave me a diary and asked me to scribble in it…any old nonsense, he said and I wouldn’t have to show it to anyone. That idea really grabbed me, that privacy bit. So day by day I started. At first it was drawings, doodles, even pictures I liked. Then each year got a little complicated. Growing up, secrets shared, first crushes, giggly school friends, the first Harold Robbins (OMG they actually write this stuff!!!), boys, dreams, nightmares, fantasies, fears, anger, resentment, joys…everything came to be chronicled and by the time I left college I could give you a little detail about each day of my life from age ten…..Amazing. And crazy. I had this little cupboard (locked, of course) in my room at home where I stored these diaries….and I would guard it with my life….the keys were well hidden and in my custody even when I was away in college.

Then, one day before I got married I opened that cupboard and spent the better part of the day sitting in front of it. Some of it made me laugh, some made me cry and a lot made me shudder at my own naiveté and idiocy!!! So I burned it all. Dragged out every last bit of loose paper and let it burn. Today I sometimes wonder why I didn’t just seal it all in a carton and bring it with me……but years of my life were gone. I do not know why I did it. Was it to safeguard my own privacy or was it just a ploy to hide what a jackass I could be? And now that I’m older and it has ceased to matter what people think, those are the pages of my life I miss…the humdrum days of a girl growing up slightly confused, slightly crazy and more than slightly rebellious.

No, I don’t think I was either unique or newsworthy but that life was mine.

And now when I sit with a pen in hand I often find my uninspired writing: “…..went to court and came home…clients in the evening…conference at 8” and wonder why I write. Isn’t all of that in my Court diary anyway, and who the hell cares…years later if I read this diary will I enjoy sifting thorough pages of a routine existence…ah but that’s it. It’s our monotony that makes us what we are. And right now more often than not it makes me bored and crabby and difficult to live with.

Which brings me to the second thought of today: Over the weekend a little room on top of the terrace has been made ready. Although I call it mine, it actually isn’t. It’s just an unused empty room used to house servants earlier which now is empty and which I plan to use as my own space to paint…anyone is welcome… yesterday I took pains to make it as nice as I could. So there went my easel and canvases and paints and pretty soon I can begin this tiger that’s growling about in my head…I love painting tigers…. and the moon…. A week earlier I was in Puri. The most beautiful part of that trip was the night we sat on the beach at night, drinks in hand. The full moon was two days old. And the sight of the silver echoed on the dark waters is enough to soothe any soul. So when a friend said poetry, this is, inter alia, what I smsed:

“ Shine on beautiful, the night is still new

call out in the darkness, my reply is in shades

of white…and of nights of black madness

shimmering in the glow

of a heart too drunk to care

and a head too heathen to know……”

Or this:

“Full moon, two nights old

on the vast ocean soothe my soul

Dreams in white reflected in the dark

Call out to you, resident of my heart…”

Crazy? Sure. Until next time….