How to Write Nothing

I’ve walked into a book café for the first time with the agenda of writing something spectacular while sipping on hot chocolate and looking intent. Too much pressure.

The first floor has the kids reading section that leads to the café. Some of them are running around and I’m getting more and more miserable at keeping a sexy intelligent look about me. There is a young couple sitting across me. They aren’t talking. There’s also a very old man sitting beside me who has been shakily but determinedly turning one page every two minutes of these expensive magazines. I pick up on too. Not Vogue, no…I pick up The Economist. I browse through the Contents and select a story I would be able to fully understand. For the first time in living memory, inflation will drop below GDP growth. That’s a good thing. Growth is great. Now that I know the good news I decide to skim through the article…compares with $9000 in China…continental shift…yes yes, very well. I decide to study the graph, bend real low and peer closely- the blue and green lines begin to blur and I almost fall on my face in the book.

Perhaps this was a bad idea. I pick up Vogue and count eight different ways to put eyeliner. Across the road, through the glass pane I can see a woman with long brown hair and big pearl earrings (they must be really big because I can see them from across the street). Her office is furnished in white and she’s fixing her hair.

Twenty minutes after staring at disturbingly chic outfits in the magazine, I look up to see that the woman is still fixing her hair. I snap the big book shut; it must weigh five kilos and it costs a shameless 800 rupees. Back in Delhi, I had stopped buying glossy magazines because my grandmother couldn’t keep herself from tearing the pages to put them inside cupboards under expensive crockery. In case of magazines like Vogue, she would arrange the papers systematically in her attempt to keep the izzat of the half-naked women intact. 

God I miss her.

I wish to sit on the floor at home and have her lovingly massage my head. And as she rubs the mustard oil in, I wish she rubs in a fantastic story for me to write as well.