It has been a perpetual mystery to me. I mean, here I am, one able bodied young man with no apparent disability (or ability for that matter). Certainly no Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. In fact, I am pretty normal when it comes to my Hand (he deserves the exaltation doing what my brain bids him to do). And yet, put an innocuous pen in my Hand and a scrap in front and watch him throttle to life of his own. He darts around the page in an orgy of crazed devastation defying every law of gravity, friction, motor control….. so much so that I can fancy having the most destructive fist after Muhammad Ali.
I don’t know what went wrong and when. There was that innocent age when, at the dubious urgings of a promised cane, I spent hours hunched over those beastly 30 minutes improve-your-handwriting books. Dutifully I traced every hideous curlicue that the book demanded – pushing my pencil in those unfathomable maneuvers that constitute good handwriting. All I ever drew was a nil and six of the choicest. A sore ego, a sorer hand, and still sorer are the abiding memories of those days.
I tried, God know I tried. I twisted Hand through impossible contortions; I slanted the font this way and that from a laying down position to a falling headlong position. I changed pens, crayons, pen-grips, ink – everything except my handwriting. That dratted spider refused to amend its wayward rumblings.
Teachers, either gave me the benefit of doubt and awarded full marks or (and more often) I had to pay the penance of suspicion with no marks at all. There was this gentle soul who looked an entire page of sweat stained calculations because she thought it was rough work. Another sweet old thing suggested that I get my Hand fractured and get someone else to write my exams. Most other squinted gamely at my paper for sometime, polished their glasses, finally threw up their hands and went for an eye test. The strain was too much, they said. The only encouraging person I knew was the local druggist. He said, “This boy is going to be a doctor. I can read it in his hand”.
Then once I happened to come across this learned book on handwriting analysis. It classified handwritings into types very systematically and then drew inferences about the writer’s character. Very clever indeed, until it ran up against my script. In the next couple of hours I discovered that I was a manic, depressive, homicidal, brilliant, retarded, left-handed, cock-eyed incestuous – all that from that priceless manual and that too from the sentence, “This is a handwriting analysis sample.” Even my full stop yielded fresh insights into my psyche (habitually messy) and my redention of the humble ‘p’ generated such stream of adjectives that I had to make a hasty retreat. All I could make out of it was that I was a schizophrenic and an illegible one at that.
All this time I sailed through those terrifying written exams unscathed courtesy the mercy of long suffering teachers and Hand’s whim. My standard pre-exam prayer was, “Lord, forgive Hand for I know not what He is doing”. Objective exams were simpler. All I had to do was to fill a given circle. It took a double fisted backhand to do it, but I succeeded. Well, I finally landed in a college (someone in the Maths department of my college has to thank me for his glasses). Astonishingly I worked myself into good books of every invigilator – all they had to do to prevent ‘topoing’ was to place me in the more ‘active’ section of the class and go off for a stroll. I sure made a first class buffer.
I tried my ‘Hand’ at volunteering. I terrorized every single printer. I was never given any poster job, because, as someone put it, “The day he does the posters we are going to be in the dock for spreading obscene literature”.
And when I landed a job as Structural Engineer, boy, I was invaluable. Any mistake in drafting, grammar and printing and my colleague would murmur wearily, “You know how it is with his handwriting….”
Nothing so awful about Handwriting except that sometimes, as it happened in my case, a self-addressed envelope came 3 months late and bearing the legend, ‘redirected from Australia’.
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