First copy
I got my dad’s eyes. And his kindness. Also the overthinking. My creative streak is definitely from mom. As a child, I remember being super excited about these beautiful floral designs she would sew onto white cushion covers. She once told me that when she was younger, she could see and remember art and paintings and draw it back entirely from memory. And while she did not get much of a chance at education, she loved to write.
I also think I have her capacity to love.
My brother and I share an appetite for adventure, having spent a lot of our childhood scaling the roof of our old house. Only he bounced up like a cat, while I would find myself dangling precariously from the edge on one leg, screaming for mom to come and rescue me.
I also copied his sleeping posture (on my left side, with one leg perpendicular to the other, and a pillow between my arms). And we have the same personality quirk, which can either be annoying or endearing, depending on who you are.
My English teachers in school introduced me to the language. To literature and stories. The stories made me a dreamer. In 5th grade, a group of us wrote and sketched a whole damn mystery novel. Got it spiral bound and all. I don’t know where that ‘novel’ is anymore, or those friends. But I still think about what a bunch of 10-year olds accomplished.
The first book I ever read was The Adventures Of Rusty, by Ruskin Bond. I was fascinated. By the mountains and by life in small hilly towns. To this day (and forever), mountains hold a special place in my heart. People who know me, know the visceral, childlike joy I radiate when I am in the hills.
In school I also learned proper Hindi. And the dramatics of it from Bollywood movies. You’ll often catch me using “shiddat” when I speak. And I'll never lose a chance to say “Parampara. Prathishta. Anushasan”.
I can switch my accent, depending on who I’m talking to. I do it almost involuntarily. This comes from growing up as a Bengali in Jharkhand, surrounded by friends from Bihar, spending four years in Orissa for college, another seven in Mumbai working and the past three years in Bangalore. True story, once a cab driver started a full-blown conversation with me in Kannada, after I used my perfect Bangalorean accent to tell him I'd pay via UPI.
My love for travel is thanks to the friends I made in my first job. My anger is from circumstantial setbacks and my sense of humour was developed amongst seniors in my advertising days - broken adults using jokes as defence mechanism.
I guess then, I could say I'm not an original (at least not entirely). More like a first copy. And so are you. We are all a bit of each other, maybe. A sum of everything we’ve ever seen, felt, experienced, loved, lost. Like strings of Fibonacci, building from the ones before us. And if none of us are truly original, I believe there’s some merit in thinking that we’re far less different than we imagine? That our unique abilities and oddities are just layers over a shared foundation of sameness. That every stranger we've ever encountered, even fleetingly, has formed a part of us, and we theirs. That itself makes us not strangers. Not alone. Because our aloneness is also not uniquely ours.
And that’s kind of reassuring, no?
Love,
N
