November 17, 2008 @ 12:21 pm
The Final Enclosure
A pencil nestled cosily between his left ear and the slightly balding head. A black frame of spectacles, plastic, rested on his nose and peered at you intrudingly. His hands were holding a canvas, trying to fix it on the easel.
The nearby table was old and had numerous cracks on its surface. Each of the gaps on the table depicted a unique color, caused due to those drops of colors that failed to attain their life’s eternal goal of being impressed upon a canvas, and instead just meandered away aimlessly through the table’s undulations. Like lives that never made it to wherever they were intended to. Like lives that left a colorful memory behind, but not quite like the lives that many others know and praise about. He fixed the canvas, looked at it ardently for two full minutes and then nodded as though the world was now known to him. A few moments of silence passed by, during which the sun light streamed in as fast as it could, as though rushing to catch the start of a performance.
The pencil was brought out and rested back in singular motions of the left hand. Sketches were made, erased, made and erased again. Memories of his life flashed in his head, faded away, returned and faded away. Perfection was just a flourish-of-the-hand away. Yet, that was the most difficult part to attain. After hours of toiling in the studio, with the fan switched off lest some of the colors should dry and lose their lustre, he stepped back to watch what his pencil had done. The black strokes of graphite had managed to carve out an enclosure on the white canvas. An enclosure that looked like a small room with brick walls. Just four simple brick walls, no windows, no doors. He looked at it and smiled. This was what he wanted. An enclosure, a safe place from the exceedingly vulgar white of the canvas. The canvas was vast, was too white and was strange – all at the same time. The enclosure that he had sketched, however, was a finite area, a place within which he knew every contortion of the fabric, its every layer and every minute detail. The four walls drawn depicted a room as seen at an angle from above. The sketch was done with a few furious strokes of the pencil. This time, colors were not needed. The black of the pencil had done the job. Any more color would have dragged his creation into the borders of profanity.
Black and white it had to be. That was how it was meant to be. The colors come in, make their presence felt, and then bid goodbye. The final truth, however, continued to lay in the two distinct shades of life. There was nothing gray beyond a point. That point had finally arrived. He laid down his pencil, removed his spectacles, folded them and placed them on the old table. A table that had witnessed decades of life’s colorful moments. Sad moments, happy moments. Now was the time to abandon the canvas, and to accept that little enclosure. An enclosure which promised peace and eternal security from the garishly white of the canvas. He had to leave the canvas, he had nothing more to do there. He embraced the four walled room, lay down on the cold white floor, and took his sleep. A sleep devoid of any colors. Just a four walled enclosure which carried him away from the canvas. And the usually moist palette never wept again. It never bled again.
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