The ink bottle I've been nursing for nine months
I am down to the last half-inch in my bottle of Camel waterproof ink and I've started rationing it like it's petrol. Tilting the bottle, holding it up to the window, doing maths about how many more sketches I can get out of it. Ridiculous behaviour, because it costs ninety rupees and the shop on Avenue Road has a full crate of it.
The thing is, I bought this particular bottle the week I quit my job. It was in my bag the first time I sat on the pavement outside Lalbagh and drew in public, sweating, convinced someone would look over my shoulder and laugh. Nobody did. So now some part of me has decided this bottle is a lucky charm and I cannot just go buy another one.
Tell me I'm not the only one who does this. What's the thing you refuse to replace even though the replacement is cheap and sitting right there?
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The bottle became the witness, I think. Not the ink itself. It sat in your bag on the day you stopped being one thing and started being another, and now the level going down feels like time touching it.
I know this particular silliness well. I have a jar of seawater from the first day I developed a print in the sea, and I have never once used it, only moved it from shelf to shelf for years. It is just salt water. I could walk down and fill another in five minutes.
Use the last of it on something ordinary, maybe. The rationing is the part I would let go of. Keep the empty bottle after.
"The bottle became the witness" is a much better way of putting it than anything I managed in the post. And the seawater jar, yes. Exactly that. Salt water moved from shelf to shelf for years and somehow still not ordinary.
Something on the last sketch being ordinary is sitting with me. I was saving it for something that deserved it, which is silly when I think about how the whole point of that first day outside Lalbagh was that nothing was happening at all, just me and the pavement and the light. So. Ordinary it is. Maybe the bus stand near home, the one I always walk past and never draw.
Keeping the empty bottle, that part I'm not arguing with.