Waiting for Friday Night

He sat in the corner, not able to decide what to do in his free time. Each day after he finished his assignments and came back home, he was faced with this unique problem. He was a cartoonist, and he was experienced in drawing caricatures of men. But that was at night. At day time, he worked in a lab. 

When he was at home, there were so many people around, known or unknown. Just looking at them gave him weird ideas on how to turn them into cartoons. Often he went back home, put pencil on paper, then for a couple hours was transported to an imaginary world of facial elements floating, which through his willpower he harnessed and put together into a living form on paper. There was nothing dull about such days however trying the work might have been. He was satisfied with his life, happy with the little that he did. 

On some days, he went to the theatre, watching whatever went on, getting ideas from individual performances. He rarely ever cared about the story, and even the soppiest love story left no thread of impression on him. 

Getting up from the chair, he sighed because the price of cigarettes had increased. Lighting one, he went out on the balcony to smoke. How frugal and insignificant his thoughts had become. He could not understand the transformation, and feared that the change might be permanent. He was young. He had a stack of paper on his table, dusty with neglect. He didn’t feel like drawing. At home, the dust never settled on his stack of paper. He made an effort to clean his stack, hoping to find some inspiration in the routine, but it never came. There were trees and beautiful birds and a stray dog here and there, but there were no new faces. He couldn’t understand what was wrong, him or the world around? 

It was Monday, and on Mondays he used to go to the library, knowing well the dreary week ahead. It was a form of rebellion against drudgery. He felt a sense of fulfillment to delve in random pieces of literature and art and to store them in his memory to be recollected at unwieldy times during the week. He felt good knowing that there was so much beauty in the world in spite of the all grey tempers. Then there were his office colleagues and his pencil was his mouth through which he expressed his deepest feeling and resentments. In his mind, he often combined the furtiveness of his insecure officemates and the more relaxed humor of street food vendors to create something unique on paper which he called a sketch into the clandestine caricatures of the human mind as carefully obscured behind impermeable facial expressions. He took pride in his creations. 

But this Monday, he had no such library to visit and no street food vendors frying paranthas to observe. He had the night sky, and the leaves occasionally fluttering in the breeze. He tried to find inspiration in them, but they did not speak a language he understood. Human speech was music to his ears, but right now he had nothing to listen to. He went back to his stack of paper and took out a sheet. His wastepaper basket was already quite full. He took his pencil out and drew a line. The line was supposed to be a canal irrigating his creative desires. 

Every line he ever drew gave rise to a beautiful and unique image. The sketch was just a realistic impression of that image in his mind. Every month he finished a minimum of twenty sketches. Hundreds of unfinished ones ended up in his wastepaper basket. 

He looked at the wastepaper basket and asked himself how many of them even had that starting pencil streak? He preferred to look at it to remind him of home, searching for an inspiration hidden somewhere in his mind, unknown to his conscious self. He was an optimist, a chronic one. His phone rang, and a tired voice complained of the week ahead, waiting for Friday night, so that they could party and booze again. He wasn’t that interested in alcohol. But he couldn’t think of a better way to spend the weekend, however much he raked his brain. 

Weekends at home were pleasant, not a ritual in pouring out weekly frustrations. They were spent in quiet repose, watching movies, eating some good food and occasionally meeting friends to exchange notes on all the weird things that happen in the world. 

The only thing weird now was the unerring sedation of a staid life with practically no potential for adventure, he thought. He sighed again. It was becoming a habit, like all unpleasant habits. He could turn up his music system to drown his thoughts, but he has listened to those songs so many times that it gave him no great verve to do so. He had come to the end, a standstill, he felt. He searched for a meaning, but it was always the meaning that he could not fathom. 

Lazily he went out of his room, his heart unable to be excited. He walked out onto the porch. The night was splendid. The stars twinkled like they have been throughout time eternity. Maybe they could teach him a lesson. The sky was so clear that he could almost see a little boy sitting on the crescent moon fishing. He remembered the logo of DreamWorks he had seen so many time while watching movies. He yawned and forgot everything. What happened to him the last couple of hours, the thoughts and emotions that he went through became insignificant. He still couldn’t think of anything to draw. Shrugging his shoulders, he returned. The only way to see the light was to crawl through to the end of the tunnel. Yes, he hoped that should inspire him for the time being, or at least break up the clouds blurring his thoughts. 

Dwaipayan Adhya