Scribbles.

I

In 1993, just as I turned three, my parents got our house repainted. That was also the year I discovered crayons.

The living rooms walls, devoid of all the picture frames and paintings that previously hung from them, gleamed white, stark and enticing.

My coloring adventures, which until then had been restricted to paper and my coloring books suddenly had a big, clean canvas, and as my parents took the neighbors around for a tour of the house, I grabbed my coloring set and zoomed around the room leaving a straight blue line on the wall, three feet from the ground.

II

One of the oldest pieces of furniture in the house was a simple, galvanized steel, storage box with copper rivets. It contained things we didn’t need regularly around the house — excess cutlery, wrapping paper, and ribbons, fruit baskets and clocks that could be gifted, unused diaries, old gadgets and broken toys. My mum called it Pandora’s box, because my sister and I would unleash something evil and break something from it every time it was opened, so it was mostly kept shut.

By age six, when I could no longer draw boats and planes on walls without getting into trouble for it, this box became my new blank canvas to write on. Hidden in plain sight in a corner of the playroom, topped high with mattresses, my pencil-on-steel, palimpsest-like writing on the front and side surface of the box was visible only when you looked from up close. It started as something to play with and became a record of my early years. I would sit on the floor in front of it and write, draw and erase as I pleased.

My name written, again and again, over ten years, in various stages of handwritings and styles, quotes from favorite books, more boat and plane drawings, random words spelled correctly or incorrectly, lists of names of my friends, complaints about squabbles with my sister over her keeping our bedroom lights on while she read, dates and events meant to be remembered forever that I can’t make sense of anymore.

III

I outgrew the box in high school since my scribbles now needed better organization and I had more ergonomic tools like a bulletin board and journals at my disposal. In architecture school, I had a tendency to include some sort of large chalkboard wall or dry erase wall as a free-play design element whenever I could.

Over the years, I also seem to have developed a penchant for all graffiti. Not just for the intended artsy kind, but also the public property defacing kind, like doodles on classroom desks or on the back seats of buses or movie posters, stuck on top of each other on walls that are typical in Indian cities.

For now, I’m down to dry erase boards doodles and post-it note collages and chalkboard wallpaper, but I often think back to my Pandora’s box and glance it from time to time trying to decipher the seemingly random writings and the kid who wrote them. That is my way of thinking with things.