The gift

He was wide awake in the mid hours of the night. He felt the pencil under his pillow and dragged it out slowly. His grandma was fast asleep beside him. Her loud snores confirmed her deep involvement with her subconscious. He can peacefully write now, he assured himself as he turned to a blank page in his notebook. But what should he write. He has not thought of anything till now. He scratched his hair with the tip of his pencil and looked around the room. Nope. No light of inspiration showing. He could only hear silence in the room which was getting disturbed by the sporadic snoring and sound of crickets chirping from somewhere outside the window. He concentrated on the blank page of his notebook till the horizontal lines on it got blurred. He rubbed his moist eyelid and continued thinking.

10 minutes passed and still nothing on the sheet. He regained consciousness of the room and listened to it in stillness. He could hear a song. Yes, it’s an old song, he remembered. He could hear it coming through the walls. The movement of the fan above him and the sound of the crickets outside were giving a perfect tune to the lyrics, as he began humming it through his nostrils. His eyes shimmered as the thought of poetry emerged from the song. He started scribbling it into his notebook. He wrote two pages in twenty minutes and looked at the grandfather’s watch. And then he read the lines that he had written. Not bad, he said to himself and tore out the two pages of his writing. He has got to show this to his teacher tomorrow to enter it into a competition. He reached school and waited for the class to get over. Then he rose quickly from his seat and rushed after her. His teacher stopped as she saw him coming with a piece of paper. ‘What is it?’ she enquired. ‘It’s a poem for the competition’, he said rather hesitantly. She took it from his hand and began reading it at the window side. He waited patiently with his eyes searching for some kind of expression on his teacher’s face.

‘This is very good for your age my dear’. She spoke after reading the poem. ‘You should continue writing if you can write in such a flow'. Her words were assuring and calm. He felt delighted for having written this. But then suddenly he saw his teacher’s face turn grim. ‘You know’, she said. ‘My son is exactly of your age and I have been trying to inculcate some sense of writing into him. But I have constantly failed in my efforts. He just cannot write'. He listened to this new tone of conversation and said, ‘but you are yourself a good writer, madam. Then why do you feel that your son will not carry forward the gift?' ‘It happens my dear boy. There is always darkness beneath a burning lamp'. She replied and strolled away across the corridor.