This is a story about a young girl who loved to draw. Its a hand-me-down - I was told it by my grandfather, he by his grandfather and so on. Around 310 BC, the story goes, my ancestors lived in a hot, dusty, tiny village of some 50 houses in northern India, in the present state of Rajasthan. The ancestor in question, Mohanlal Sharma – or Mollu as he was called was a short, studious, cross-eyed, 14 year old geek. Not satisfied with the misery handed to him by mother Nature and the local bullies, Mollu cemented his social position as the village clown by befriending the only person stranger than him – a girl known simply as Neelu. She was the subject of every evening conversation by the cooking fires in that village and she is, naturally, the subject of this story.
You see, Neelu didn’t have any other name. Even Mollu the village clown had a name and a family and a lineage. But no one knew where Neelu had come from, who she was or even who her parents were. The only thing the villagers knew was what her widowed father, the village chief told them – that she was adopted by him as a baby on his pilgrimage to the Jhelum river 15 years previously. And what a child he had adopted! She was fair-skinned, blue-eyed with light hair – and worst, for a young girl – tall. The village rumour was that she was in fact the daughter of a Greek soldier in Alexander’s invading army but the chief refused to encourage that belief. Despite being an obvious target however, she was never picked on. This was not out of deference to her father but out of a fear of her. For Neelu was not just different physically, she had a mysterious power. And this mysterious power would culminate – as they always do – in a mysterious incident.
10 years prior to this incident, she came home with a book she had found lying in a maize field. It was blank with a brown hide-bound cover and the paper was thick and rough but of sturdy quality. Neelu loved drawing so she grabbed a piece of chalk and in the fading light of the evening she drew a camel with two humps and a bell around its neck, looking very lost in a maize field. Next morning she was woken up by a great furore as the entire village rushed to the field to see a fantastic sight – for this part of the world only had one-humped camels and no one had ever seen the strange creature wandering about, its bell tinkling away in the early morning breeze. One wizened old villager claimed he had heard of such camels roaming the lands beyond the Himalayas, but to everyone else it was a miracle. Like any other child, Neelu was a little scared and very excited by what she knew. She rushed home to test the book and drew a rain-cloud and what do you know, that very evening it rained!
Naturally it was very, very hard for her to keep her secret and it soon became widely known that Neelu was not only strange, she was possessed by the gods (if you were her dad) or a demon (if you were a bully). Long story short, Neelu was quietly teased behind her back and begged, cajoled and harassed to her face because what more could anybody want than to have their every wish come true from the pages of a book? She very quickly learnt its rules – she could draw whatever she wanted but she could not draw the impossible into existence (she tried drawing a four-headed horse, but it didn’t work). And every time she thought of drawing something for herself a loud voice in her head told her she would lose her power if she did. So Neelu drew for everyone but herself – ripe fields of maize for the farmers, rain-clouds on hot summer evenings for the women, sweets, candies and trees to swing from for the kids, even lakes to cool off in for the village camels and dogs! But as her demand grew and the drawings kept coming to life she found herself increasingly isolated and feared. The only person who stayed by her side was Mollu – her constant friend and the only person to have never asked her to draw for him.
Years passed and by the time she was 15 Neelu’s fame had spread to neighbouring villages and made her something of a tourist attraction. Things came to a head when the 60 year old chief of a prosperous village came to her father with gifts and the offer of a marriage – between him and Neelu. His astrologer had advised him to marry again and marry young and he promised her father he would give her a place of honour in his household. This was an offer her father could not refuse. From the day he adopted her he had worried about her marriage and once word spread of her talent he had slept fitfully every night wondering where he would find a groom who’d agree to marry someone so… weird! He accordingly sat her down, explained the situation to her and told her to get ready for her marriage next month. Neelu protested vehemently. She had heard stories, told by travellers from other villages, about the great cities and kingdoms along the Jhelum, Beas and Ganges rivers and of the kings and princes that ruled there. She wanted to travel, to draw, maybe even find someone worthy to marry, preferably of her own age! Her father refused, angry at her stubbornness and locked her up in her room.
This put Neelu in a dreadful quandary. She could have drawn her way out of the room but that would be her last ever drawing and she’d be left standing outside her house looking very foolish. But Mollu was never far away from her and somehow he always knew what she wanted. He sneaked into her house when her father was away and let her out. Mollu had no intention of marrying yet and though he had it much easier as a boy, he understood Neelu’s feelings. Who would want to live the rest of their life with a horrible, ugly, 60 year old man?! They ran away from the village and hid in the maize field where she had drawn her first camel into existence. Mollu whispered to her that, for the first time in his life, he wanted her to draw something for him. She listened to what he wanted, then gave him a long hug and with tears in her eyes she started to draw as Mollu ran back to the village.
The next morning when Mollu led the worried search party to the maize field all they found was a single, teardrop-stained page torn from a book and on it the most exquisite drawing they had ever seen. Neelu had drawn the maize field as she saw it aglow in the setting sun. But at the edge of the field she had drawn a tall, handsome horse black as ebony with a grey diamond on his forehead and a silvery-black mane that shone when it caught the sunlight. And as Mollu had wished – she had drawn herself, a tiny girl on a tall horse, waving goodbye to the hot, tiny, dusty village she had lived her entire life in.
BEAUTIFUL!!
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