Following A Tall Story, something within me had been wishing to tell her a short one. Having studied English Literature and taught it too, for most of my teaching years, the genre of short story was quite known to me. It had introduced me to Oscar Wilde, to Kate Chopin. I had taught George Orwell, Joseph Conrad and of course, Katherine Mansfield. But to mason one, for a daughter, is a pressure that no teaching assignment had ever had on me. Not even like the one when I taught Alice in Wonderland to students pursuing Masters at Presidency. Twelve hours of nervousness before the class, and two minutes into it, later, things were just wonderful. A class apart.
Writing a story for a daughter, however, means you won't be marked on your presentation skills, you will instead, be believed, for life. Telling, or reading out to her the same wouldn't assert your prowess over the language or your agile movement with the plot. It would be a grand bestseller the day she asks for a second telling of it, or asks out a continuation the next night. You would become a storyteller in your own rights when she would begin living with the characters you tailored for her. So I tried one:
A Matchbox has one hundred soldiers, all cooped up inside a box, eager to light up, anything you want them to. Paper, cigarette, fire, gas-burner, incense stick -- you name it. Petty lives, they came for a change, collectively. One of them, Will -- his name, wanted to live longer and not burn out for someone else's useless cause. So, cleverly, Will rubbed against his friends in a manner that his edge became blunt enough to not burn.
As expected, when Mom took Will out to light her cigarette, it failed and then, disgusted, Mommy threw it carelessly into a dustbin. Will was delighted. In his previous life he was a boy who had studied "Where there is a will, there is a way".
Will made his way into the trash divider and got selected for the "Recyclable". His curiosity was dismantled when he saw a world of differences ahead of him. Nothing he knew became what they were. And while he was trying to calculate the differences, he felt a fan and fell on a mass of other Wills and shaped, he now serves as part of the new Do-It-Yourself craftbox.
We do not know if Will is happy, or not. Will wants you to find a way.
With this, I ended. My will to win is limp, as opposed to my will to delight my daughter. And I have played it safe. As the story ended, it timed well with her fiddling with the box of crafts that Grandma-B had sent her.
My daughter, her grannies, my many loves, and my friends -- people are the best short stories of my life.
A Matchbox has one hundred soldiers, all cooped up inside a box, eager to light up, anything you want them to. Paper, cigarette, fire, gas-burner, incense stick -- you name it. Petty lives, they came for a change, collectively. One of them, Will -- his name, wanted to live longer and not burn out for someone else's useless cause. So, cleverly, Will rubbed against his friends in a manner that his edge became blunt enough to not burn.
As expected, when Mom took Will out to light her cigarette, it failed and then, disgusted, Mommy threw it carelessly into a dustbin. Will was delighted. In his previous life he was a boy who had studied "Where there is a will, there is a way".
Will made his way into the trash divider and got selected for the "Recyclable". His curiosity was dismantled when he saw a world of differences ahead of him. Nothing he knew became what they were. And while he was trying to calculate the differences, he felt a fan and fell on a mass of other Wills and shaped, he now serves as part of the new Do-It-Yourself craftbox.
We do not know if Will is happy, or not. Will wants you to find a way.
With this, I ended. My will to win is limp, as opposed to my will to delight my daughter. And I have played it safe. As the story ended, it timed well with her fiddling with the box of crafts that Grandma-B had sent her.
My daughter, her grannies, my many loves, and my friends -- people are the best short stories of my life.
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