Mimeography

By Susan Dhavle

There they are – I see them - the most current magazines, a small stack –Photography Today, National Geographic, Flight, Better Homes and Gardens, Femina. I enter the room (you know – your parent’s room, familiar, but a little forbidden). There’s the very faint smell of tobacco smoke absorbed into the silken sheen of the drapes and the bed linen, mixed with the fragrance of perfumes in bottles on a carved dressing table. The drapes are glazed cotton, flock-design, in a shade my eldest sister calls ecru. “What’s ecru”, we ask her. “That colour, children”, she says, sophistication itself. The bedspread is of the same material and colour. It has a rich fringe that edges it all around, and day or night this room has the glow of cool beige light - I love it. It is my favourite room. I like it most when my parents are in it and they talk. I can’t hear their words but hearing their tones makes me feel happy. I don’t usually go in there when they are inside. We all seem to meet in other rooms. I love that there are so many books in shelves everywhere, on every wall. On the bedside tables are porcelain lamps with off white pleated gauzy shades, “NOT ecru”, says my sister. And also there are ashtrays, usually with some stubs. They are cleaned once a day but rarely are they without those stubs. Sometimes, when I don’t have plans like I have today, I just sit there reading the titles of the books. I know all of them mostly by title. I have not yet started to read so much. Our whole house is like that, everywhere there are shelves of books and some have such beauty. I love beautiful books - but more than that I like to cut out pictures. I sit gingerly on the side of the bed and reach out – so glossy, the colours are perfection itself, the smell is new and enticing, the pages are still closed tightly together, unopened, really new.

 

I get up and take what I’ve selected and lifting my frock, slip it into the waistband of my drawers. There is a shock of cold smoothness, for an instant, against my skin. The upper edge pokes out above my waistline misshaping my dress. The lower corners are digging into my thighs uncomfortably. Walking funnily with arms crossed over my chest I make it to the kids (our) bathroom. No one has seen me thank god – nothing escapes the notice of my sisters or their beady eyes most of the time – nor their censure. They are not cutters of pictures. I’m the only girl who does this and the only girl who gets in trouble because of it.

 

Locking the door and leaning against it the whole disallowed experience sinks in. The creases in the palms of my hands ooze sweat – these are my guilt ridden but driven hands, which are also shaking slightly and my heart rate is going a bit crazy. I can feel that my eyes are dilated with the anxiety of being caught – the knowledge that this is going to be judgment day again, I don’t know how it will happen and when but that it is inevitable - I have to do it, no matter what. I have to find what’s in there for me in these new magazines. If there’s nothing to find and keep - oh my heaven - walking there and back with this stuffed in my drawers would be just a horrible unwanted risk. I know that this activity gets me in trouble every time but what is it that compels me, propels me forward toward it, to actually take these perfect magazines and cut from them what I want. My sisters will kill any joy of mine if they catch me.

 

I start going through the pages – delighted sensation of those moments - admiring lovely pictures. I never remember most of the subjects much - not for me to admire pretty pictures of sunrises and sunsets, nor ugly big throated lizards, palm trees, stylish looking faces and such. Those types just bore me. But something else, something that just draws me to them, pictures that are indescribable, something like thaumaturgy - a wizard made them - some genius put them there for me to find and feel the thrill of their magnificence. I feel for the scissors already in my dress pocket. Sitting on the closed toilet seat I cut so neatly, so carefully and so slowly, with precision, almost as though I’m going to get a prize or praise for my neatness. I keep a precise margin around my favourite pictures...Now I have the ones I want and they are so beautiful. I close the magazine, hold the pictures up turn by turn, scrutinize them with head bent to the side, my eyes narrowed. I put them against the tiled wall – line them at an angle just so, just how I like to see them. There are some here I really, really like.

 

Now again I place the magazine into the waistband, feel the discomfort of those corners digging in cruel reminder of my misdeed, into my flesh every time I bend my legs to take a step, see the top making my frock stand out like I have strangely dislocated ribs sticking right out of their cage. I open the door, sidle out, place the pictures between the pages of a cardboard covered notebook under my pillow, turn, and one of my sisters comes in. I nearly choke out a spontaneous explanation, quickly raise an arm, right across my chest, scratching an armpit – and she hasn’t noticed. I almost make the sign of the cross with relief. I walk out and she still doesn’t catch sight of my awkward gait – a bit faster now, danger signals flashing into my eyes in streaks of white, silver, black.

 

I make it to my parent’s room and place the magazine back where I think it was in the pile. Quickly I survey the scene. I am so good at this but never ever have I been forgiven for it. I keep expecting that someone will understand, and will know why I love to collect these gorgeous images. This room is like a treasure chest – you know very well the treasure is just your parent’s things but their things draw you to them as if to a jewel box full and spilling over with precious metals and stones of sparkling, glinting hues, of unlimited silver and gold, of everything you ever coveted and wanted to play with.

 

I can’t remember when the loud angry yell comes – that evening, the next day, some days after, but it is a bellowed, “damnation take it, who’s done this, come here all of you”. Of course the whole deed from start to finish is imprinted on my face and my wide staring eyes and since I had done this many times before all eyes are turned on me. I am standing there with the whole family but I agree to my guilt by my silence and lack of denial and knowing what is inevitably going to follow and biting my lip, I get prepared.

 

Later, none of my sisters talks much to me about it, actually feeling sorry for me – amazingly! My elder brother thinks me a kid – he always grimaces at me when there’s silence after a storm of angry recrimination. He’s no angel  (but no devil either, in my book) – with tennis balls, cricket balls, footballs, he’s smashed light bulbs and picture frames and ashtrays but they’re not such awful crimes – these things happen, children will be children. I don’t know what to think about all this. When I’m in trouble he looks worriedly at me, half smiles and shakes his head “You’ve got to stop this – now grow up kiddo”, he says, pulling my plait gently. I love my brother so much. He is like me in some ways. My sisters are not so gentle but they want me to not get in trouble so much - “Nutcase, mad, what do you get from being so destructive, even before they can be read....” I answer them with my surliest frowns. They call these wonderful images, these treasures of mine ‘illustrations’ but I know they’re taken with a camera and printed in those magazines for my pleasure and enjoyment! I never cut pictures from books, I value them too much and books are meant to lie on shelves and to be taken down again and again and read and appreciated. They are never put on the pile of old newspapers and stuff that will be discarded. I try to copy things I like in them by drawing them instead, if I can, but these same things, these magazines, so precious now, will be thrown aside and end up sooner or later in a pile with the kabadi vala, so I take my chances. I have the idea I can go there, go inside those images. I have to just be still and transport myself. It is so possible.

 

My favoured ones are just strange, just these unconventional compositions to my siblings, who I think are simpletons and have no idea of what joy to get from all this. Here’s the most interesting – a human face almost ghostly and intersected by multidirectional lights, Masai tribesmen caught in the air as they jump, bodies held straight, wearing those vivid coloured garments wrapped like bandages about their tall, spare, muscular frames, and then that view of a staircase from the ground up, ascending everlastingly into a land that I imagine is more full of interesting things than I or anyone else can ever know. It puts me in mind of a nautilus shell. I want to climb up or down it all the time, reaching somewhere. It is not just these pieces of paper I crave but the imprint and the value I give each of them as I peer at what I collect under where I place my head each night.

 

I go to bed nursing a pair of burning legs, strapped in welts with the holdall leather belt. It was just one hard snap, actually, as I uselessly tried to twist my knees to one side, swivelling my hips like a dance move - to avoid it - but it swung into me, slapped my flesh and stung. I don’t even cry, just gasp in voluntarily, I never ever cry, and then, with my face expressionless I walk out and go to my room. I stand behind the curtain for a while, thinking it over!

 

“Why do you do it?” my sisters asked me once. I’m the type who doesn’t answer such questions. I want them to understand everything that I know and think about it but they are just so stupid sometimes. I would tell them if I knew how to, wouldn’t I? I feel something so vague about this mission to collect these images of a nature that I wait to be taken by surprise with every time. Something will turn up that I can’t imagine, and when it does it is my passport to a place that I spend time in, being an escape artist. I can’t describe it to them and anyway I never tell them what I think because they think I’m not all there. Feeling the slight welts on my legs, running my fingers over them, only makes them burn more so I wait patiently for it to subside, and anyway, really, no one has any sympathy. No one can deal with what I do – “Impossible child”, the adults dismiss me with – “No discipline, no guidance taken, no laws followed, no practices up held, no fundamentals of good childlike behaviour”. It describes me. I am so sure that I’m really not that bad.

 

But I’m much too drowsy finally to be involved with family opinions. Now it is night. After this eventful day is done, I’m in the safety and security of my bed. I pull the sheet up over my head. My body lies in repose but my hands reach for the book and feel for the glossy smoothness. I pass my fingers over them and know them by heart. I had been feeling slightly bad that there are neat holes in that magazine which tomorrow someone will sit reading and must have anticipated going through, but by then it will be all stillness and my parents will tranquilly sit there leafing through the pages, ignoring the mutilation of the pages and never mentioning it. There will be calm and stillness in our house. Someone will even muss my hair and I might very well get a kiss early in the morning when I sit down to eat breakfast. Someone will glance, not speaking, at my legs, and there will be no more said. And I will tell myself I will be good. I’ll never do this again. I’ll take my skipping rope to go outdoors and play like it is any other day.

 

But I may - I probably will - do it all over again. I’ll go looking for that magical interlude. I don’t even like pretty pictures. I ignore those. And it’s not as if I find what I like in every book or magazine. I admire those flashy, blurry, speedy images - that angle, that look, something – anything - I don’t know exactly what it will be that the artist and I will share, what trick of the mind he or she will play out for me. I have no idea what someone has in store for me for the gleanings of my mind.

 

I feel for them again now. The lights are off, there’s just a slight flashing of lights from a passing car in the distance and then it is dark but continuously quiet again. I know exactly what they are, these illusions in my mind. I lie still as a child’s corpse, even still my hands, now only lost in my own places that I roam with these people who take me there.

 

For I am the Masai warrior, in that taunting bold, brave colour, with countless colourful circles of beads about my neck, jumping in rigid vigour, my head held high, then when that tires me I puzzle over that inscrutable face, placing eyes, nose and then the other features of that visage in place, that face in quiet pensiveness, and finally as my eyes feel heavy, my hands glide down the silky wood of that grand banister, trailing my ethereal gown down it. The weals on my legs have spread, dissipating, but I don’t touch or even bother to care for them, I drift down gently, regally, feeling for the slightest blemish or dip in the aged, lovely wood with my fingertips, gliding, gliding, wafting down it further, and so, as my sense of triumph wears off, quite contentedly I go so slowly, so very slowly, into untroubled, guiltless slumber.

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Susan Dhavle has done creative writing before in the form of short articles for the magazine ‘Parenting’ in the 1990s and feature articles for many newspapers also in that period. This work is an attempt to write after a long lapse in creative writing. She is also engaged in writing her autobiography and a collection of short stories. Her contact is:  <susanddhavle@gmail.com>