A Brush With Rebellion

Published by Amarillo Bay, an international online literary magazine
Volume 17 Number 2 – Published 18 May 2015

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"Is that goat eating a tire?" Mum asked, as we tried to locate the art class.

"Looks like it," I replied, watching the tall, black goat with lanky locks of hair as it was chewing a bicycle tire. It seemed to be in a meditative state, its glazed eyes fixed on something in the distance. We had come to find the art class, the first in a line of many for me.

By the time I was in middle school, my parents and I had come to the same conclusion. I was pretty lousy at the Sciences and Mathematics. I tolerated History and Geography. My only real loves were English and Drawing. I actually did not weep the night before the English exam. I read Wordsworth for fun. Art, Drawing or A-Perfect-Waste-Of-Time, as many people would call it, was not even a subject at my school, yet I practiced it all the time. On Sunday afternoons while the world slept, I covered sheets of paper with mountains, jungles, roads and disproportionate people. The pages of my Math and Chemistry textbooks (my sworn enemies) were covered in little doodles. These drawings were not of flowers, hearts, or ribbons, the usual candidates to adorn teenage girls' books. These drawings were of daggers dripping blood, witches stirring cauldrons, and pistols firing bullets at will. It's amazing how drawing reflects the deep subconscious. The evening before my Physics exam, Mum came to my desk expecting to find me deep in the world of velocity and electricity. I was deep, so deep into 'Chapter 13: Electromagnetism', that I had covered two pages with ice-cream cones. They dripped cream and berries all over the definitions and problems, which was a mighty big improvement on the subject, according to me. Mum sighed, shook her head and left the room. I thought I was in trouble, but instead she enrolled me for an art class. On the first Saturday of the summer vacation, I sharpened my soft lead pencils, packed my erasers, and we headed to Mr. Thakur's Art Academy.

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