The Boy who ate Pencils & became One

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His mother remained miffed with him no matter how well he behaved, be it eating his breakfast at the dining table or taking the school bus without making a fuss. It didn’t matter whether he finished his homework earlier than he was expected to or if he kept his room tidy or not. Even abiding by the cardinal rule of his mother—brushing twice a day—didn’t matter. Her irate cheeks refused to deflate. 

Sometimes he implored her to give up her anger.

“Not possible. Until and unless you stop eating pencils,” she said then, parting her lipstick lined lips ever so little lest her cheeks deflate inadvertently.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t try to stop; he did.

But at the first sight of a well-sharpened pencil, he couldn’t hold himself back. The pencil would call out to him and would not stop tempting him till he jumped at it and clutched it in his tense little hands, and crunched and munched it, and gulped it down—eyes shut in utter delight.

“Son, if you keep eating these poisonous pencils, there will be this big ache in your tummy, and you won’t be able to go to school or even go out to play with your friends,” his mother would often try her best to frighten him. Fear trickled down his spine every time she used those words, but he forgot about it all the very moment he laid eyes on another pencil. 

“Mummy Ji, what can I do? These pencils pull me towards them. They talk to me. I get this strange grumbling in my tummy and I have to, have to eat them,” he replied every time she hid the pencils in different corners of the house and he somehow sniffed them out. 

One Tuesday morning, after she caught him munching on a pencil instead of the aloo parathas she had made for breakfast, she thought enough was enough. She took out the decrepit and dusty grey Chetak, tipped the scooter over, and gave it her hardest kick. It came to life, pulsating unevenly, like her scared heart. She hopped on and made him stand in front of her seat, his small hands holding the handlebar, and drove him off to many doctors, who all smiled big and talked sweet but failed to cure him. 

“All he wants is attention,” they all said in utter helplessness. 

Their words made her even more furious. In the last twenty-four hours, she had hardly found any time for herself, apart from six hours of sleep she had somehow managed to grab. How much more attention can I give him, she wondered, exhausted and weary.

“I see,” is all she could say through her pinched lips to all the doctors she consulted and brought him back him, her head spinning in frustration.

Determined but out of ideas, she then sought help from her son’s class topper, the rich boy who was considered the best counsel by everyone because parents thought their children looked up to him as a role model. The boy tried persuading him in his inimical style.

“Everyday things are being invented in this world for you to eat, and silly you are still stuck at eating pencils,” he said, and showed him a magazine. It was full of tempting photographs of the food he planned to eat as a reward for topping the class next year.

“First Biscotti,” he said, pointing to the photo of what looked like a long rusk. 

“Then Madeline,” he said, and ran his tongue over his lips.  

But alas, this didn’t help either. He remained unmoved – not a hint of regret or envy on his face.

Instead, things became even more bizarre. The next afternoon, just before school recess, the art teacher asked the students to draw a parallelogram, but he couldn’t. Like always, he had already eaten his pencils, and the teacher asked him to come and stand in front of the class with his hands raised. He was standing there with his back towards the whiteboard, and that’s when he felt a strange pull towards the whiteboard. While the teacher was still scribbling, he turned around, pushed the teacher aside, and drew an almost perfect parallelogram, not with a pencil but with his big, oily head. 

Stunned, the entire class sprang from their benches. Everything stood still. Every student — from the first first-bencher to the last last-bencher — stared at the oil dripping down from the sides of parallelogram. Even the stunned teacher, who still lay on the floor lost in folds of her brown sari, stared at it with her mouth agape.

During recess, his classmates kept asking him about an explanation for this sudden trick, and kept looking for a hidden pencil in his hair and even in his uniform — in his green sweater, in his white shirt, in his grey pants — in the hope of finding a hidden pencil, but they found nothing.

By the time the day ended and he climbed up the stairs and rang the doorbell, stretching his limbs as far as he could, the bemused teacher had already called his mother and his mother had already called his father and his father had already called his boss who in turn had already approved his leave for half a day.

“Go and take care of your son,” the generous boss had said. “But always remember what brings food to your table.”

His mother changed his clothes, scrubbed his hands hard, and served him roti-sabzi, and sat sighing in front of him. The moment she centred her eyes on the water dripping from his long, wet hair onto his pale forehead, she felt trepidation. Underneath the hair, his head had almost already turned pointy like the tip of a first-time sharpened pencil. She wanted to weep but held back. 

“Your love has turned him into a monster,” she imagined the taunts of her husband.

Next morning, she took out the scooter again and began the second round of consultations with the doctors. This time she took him to psychiatrists instead. They smiled less and talked sourly. 

“What to do, madam? He has eaten so many pencils that he has become one himself,” one psychiatrist after another concluded the same thing. “The machine never tells a lie. Not at least in the hands of an able psychiatrist.”

“But what is the machine telling you, Doctor Saab?” she asked.

“The pencil which you see on his head starts somewhere from his heart,” they explained while removing multicoloured wires from the forehead of his son. It broke her heart into a thousand pieces which fell around those whirring machines, pleading. But the conclusion remained same, and in the days to come, his journey of becoming a full pencil continued unabated. 

Three minutes after midnight, when his stressed father was trying to calm himself by catching on some latest news, his forehead turned into muted wood, and by six thirty in the morning, his unbroken skin became all but wood. When she took him for the morning bath at ten past seven, wishing it would reset whatever had happened, he started smelling like the wooden bench of the colony park.

“Hai, hai,” she sobbed while rubbing him with the soap, and breathing in that unmistakable smell.  

On Friday, around noon, even before she could wash the okra for lunch, his torso looked like a thick pencil out of which his arms and legs branched out like smaller pencils. It was as if he was a pencil tree.

Fearing unending jibes and jokes of his classmates, he refused to go to the school or even look at the mirror. She concealed both the mirrors of the house — one in the bathroom with old newspapers and another in the living room with the pastel-coloured shawl of hers.

“Son, how often I had told you not to eat pencils,” she said, sobbing and running her fingers over his wooden arms. Even so, she spent most of her day inspecting him from head to toe, from this side to that side. On that wooden frame of his, she kept looking for soft edges of his parched lips to his hard nose to his uneven teeth lest he loses his ability to speak or smell or see or eat. The pointedness of his head was impossible to miss now, even from a long distance. 

Children from the colony they lived in made matters worse. They thought it was a wonderful thing to have and suggested what he could do with such a head. 

“This pencil-head of yours is very useful. You can ring any doorbell in the colony now without needing a stool,” said a notorious one.

“You can pick mangoes from that tree by the corner without even climbing it,” said another. All of them agreed and dreamt of mangoes.

Her husband wasn’t of any solace either because his own boss wasn’t of any solace because he kept warning him in guise of a concern. 

“Don’t you worry about sewing machines now! I am there, na! What is there to worry about, anyhow? Our sales have dwindled from fifty to twenty. By this rate, by next week, we will have no sale and then you can relax even more.”

The boy’s own urge to behave like a pencil kept becoming severe and uncontrollable, and he butted everything he stood against or near and ended up scribbling his thoughts there and then. 

One Thursday afternoon, his mother left him locked in the living room and went to buy the eggplant. When she returned, he had already written on everything his head could touch and reach. The television screen, on the wall underneath the photo of his first birthday, and of course on the mint-green walls of the living room. 

What made things more poignant for her were the words he had written.

 “I am sorry, Mummy Ji.”

The same sentence had been scribbled all over, again and again. The moment she read it, the grey plastic bag fell from her hands and she trampled over the eggplant and ran from the door to the sofa where he was sitting like a wooden log and took him in one sobbing embrace.

“I forgive you my bacha, I forgive you,” she said without opening her eyes, and he started to soften there and then. The more she held him and forgave him, the softer he turned. The more she kissed his cheeks, asking for the forgiveness, the more he started smelling of the flesh and less of the wood. She understood that he wasn’t eating the pencils, but her anger.

By the time she was done with the understandings and the apologies and the regrets, he had turned all right. His strange desire to smack his head into everything and anything had died, and instead an older desire had returned. 

He felt like eating another pencil. 

But he decided to wait because his mother had cried too much, and he had already learnt that anyone who has cried too much must drink a glass of water. He stood up and started ambling towards the humming refrigerator.