The New Pen

Among many memories of my father is one of waiting anxiously until late into the night for him to return from Hyderabad to the small town where we stayed then. I wondered what he would have brought for us from Hyderabad. I knew, along with my elder brother, that there would be the latest Amar Chitra Katha comic in his suitcase along with toys. The suitcase would be opened only in the morning and so I would go to be bed wracked by anxiety. Sometimes we would sneak into his room and take a peek inside dad’s suitcase while he was in another room. On every trip to Hyderabad or some other place he would invariably get something for us kids. Now I am doing the same for my son, getting something for him whenever I go on long trips. This time I bought a fountain pen for him as he has started showing interest in writing with fountain pens.

It had not been in my mind to buy a fountain pen for my son but when I walked into a stationery store at Nehru Place to look for notebooks my eye as usual fell on the fountain pens displayed. I asked to look at a blue Pelikano school fountain pen. I almost returned it when I saw it had a cartridge filling system but the man at the counter said he had a piston mechanism that could be fitted. The pen was for one hundred and eighty rupees and the piston cost me another hundred. I put it in my bag and forgot all about it until I returned home. The first thing my kid made me do, after giving me a brief hug, was to open the bag and show him what I had got for him. Later when he gave me the pen to write with after filling ink in it I was amazed. The nib was so smooth I couldn’t believe it. To use the exact word, the nib was 'smooth as silk' just like the nib on my Meisterstuck. This was the second branded pen I was writing with after my MB. I am so besotted with the Pelikano school fountain pen that I am planning to buy one for myself. Or maybe since I can always write with my son's Pelikano I might go in for a Lamy fountain pen. There was an ad for Lamy in yesterday's papers. Uma has a Lamy pen that he speaks very highly of. Of course, it is beautiful and writes fantastically which is why he bought it in the first place. I plan to buy one, a basic model which is not too expensive, sometime in the near future.

However that wasn’t the only pen related stuff that happened on the Delhi trip. On my way to the Capital from the International airport at Hyderabad I looked into the William Penn store in the departures terminal. Actually I did not know they had a store in Hyderabad so it was a pleasant surprise coming across it. I spent about quarter of an hour ogling at all the beautiful fountain pens displayed in the store and wishing there was some way I could earn a million rupees in a day. I also tried to imagine how stylish I would appear with a Rs 25,000 fountain pen in my shirt pocket. Later in Delhi at Khan Market I saw just the outside of the ‘editions’ pen store. I did not go in though since there is no point just gawking at the pens without being able to afford them.