Kalu Maali: Unfair endings are always real!

As any other profession, journalism too would call upon its human breed to bear a few troubles and regrets. With the boastful heroics come the lists of haven’t-done’s and to-do’s. And if you are a woman, who walk into a Press room, fully driven to change the world, the common storyline of your life is that you fall in love with a bloke in or out of the paper, enter the holy mess of wedlock and bear children.

So, instead of changing the world, you watch your world change.

You go back to your fairytales, nursery rhymes, math tables and get stuck with homework. Only this time, it is because you have a child: a child who quenched the fire in you to be a daredevil. A child who is alien to the fencing skills of your pen.

And you wait and watch your orbits change.

And what about the man who wowed at the altar to be by your side during good times and bad times—happy days and sad days! He was the man who used to read your scribblings and say they were good. Now you realize, even though he read them, he never understood them completely.

You won’t blame him, coz, at the end of the day, he is just another reader.

Henrik Ibsen’s Nora is no journalist when she breaks open her cage. Yet she isn’t labeled a bad woman for seeking freedom. It looks extra-ordinary on stage or cinema screen yet, hypocritically nasty in real life. As opposed to Ruwanthie’s narrator who has understandably walked the streets, met many people and seen the world, Nora is just a closeted pet. Yet, she breaks away from the frame whereas her modern-day counterpart is still imprisoned in its four corners when the curtain falls.

Fairytales have cheated on us (with men).

Though they are named after women, it is the men in the shining armour that make them happily-ever-after’s. A woman comes to the world with a ready-made frame, whereas society sets the man free and let him pick the frame which suits him.

What makes the jubilant Kalu Maali a boy is that the frame won’t fit any other way.

Though my lips still taste bitter from last night’s premier, I buy it!

 Writer’s note: Five years down the line, I picture myself in Dil’s three-quarters, probably sporting the same hairdo. There are no big regrets for me to bag and take when I walk out of these doors. My seat is not unfillable. The void won’t remain for long. I wonder whether my hand will forget my pen---will my man still know me when he sees me?