~Manjari Himchuli~
I first noticed the itch when I was maybe nine or ten years old. I think I might have had contracted it from one of my good friends as I started experiencing it right after she won her first ever poetry contest. She had come first. My competitive spirit had awakened. And I got the itch to write. I tried to relieve it by penning down some of my patriotic sentiments in the form of a poem,’Kartabya'(responsibility). I had listed (according to the mind of a ten year old) all the responsibilities that a
true patriot ought to adopt. When I think of it now, my ears turn red. Well, they had turned red even then when my dad proudly read it out loud to the rest of the family and a family friend who was visiting us then. I felt stupid. It is a relief, ineffable relief, to express yourself in words on a paper. But sharing it with anyone else felt like being stark naked in a room full of people. And I was a shy girl.
After that, I didn’t dare to be seen naked in public. I guess, I never felt that my writing was worth sharing with anyone else besides my own crazy self, out of which it had come out in the first place. I felt I had no profound thoughts and no gripping stories worth sharing with the rest of the world. There were some times when the itch was so bad that I would quickly scribble two or three pages full of words (mere words??). And before I could even have a glance at it, the pages would be torn into pieces and flushed down the toilet bowl. That was the time when I would sometimes steal a glimpse of my naked self as I walked past a full-length mirror but I was never able to get a good look at myself. Maybe it was the self-denial that I was changing. And maybe my writing itch was going through puberty too. I couldn’t bear to see my own thoughts, not in raw naked words. I must say, my writing was changing. For a number of years, school and studies had occupied my mind and almost all of my time. I thought that itch had gone away. I had even forgotten that I had it once. The itch had been replaced by another more severe ailment; depression. There was no way I would write my thoughts then. It made the depression seem more real than it was. After all it only existed in my mind. I didn’t want to pluck it out of my crazy mind and give it life on paper. I battled with the dormant itch for a few years. But eventually, I gave in. I wrote stories that were so dark and gloomy that you needed a powerful searchlight to read the words. Even in my happiest moments, those words were powerful enough to send me tumbling down the abyss of darkness. So I tried my best never to read them again. Once again, I lost hope in my writing. First, it was shame and now it was pain.
I think I was born with that itch. It never went away. Even in my most hopeless moments, I still harbored the itch. But now the itch has taken life into a dream. A dream to write a book. Any book would do. After completing a quarter of a century in this lifetime, I think I have lived through quite a few interesting episodes to feed my imagination. How I wish I could write about them! I wish I could clothe my thoughts with such eloquence and flair that I will not be ashamed to present them in public(that too,in Nepali would be great!!). And maybe someday I will learn to heal so that I can deliver pain in not-so-dark words. Maybe someday.
(Source : Suskera.com )
