A few days ago, I stopped at a poky stationery shop to buy a plastic ink filler. It was just two Rupees but it triggered a wealth of memories.
My mind raced back to the time when I was in school and had just graduated to using fountain pens. At that stage, we owned the cheapest fountain pens available because they were stolen or lost rather frequently.
Filling up pens with ink was an art worth mastering. One had to squint to see the ink flowing into the pen’s barrel and quickly stop before it was filled to the brim. There was usually a piece of soft cloth torn off from an old vest in the geometry box to mop up the spills. Since my father was a doctor, many pharmaceutical companies used to provide blotters to him through their sales representatives.
The top of the blotter had all the details of the drug and the bottom was usually pink in colour. The blotter was a blessing in disguise because it could soak up the ink in no time, sans the messy fingers.
Much later, the market saw the introduction of imported self-filling pens. They were a vast improvement over the standard fountain pen but the only problem was, they couldn’t hold much ink and therefore were not ideal to carry during an exam.
Innovation was the name of the game then also. Sooner, ink fillers flooded the market.
They were very useful because one could open the bottle of ink (which came in two colours. Royal blue and blue black), draw out the ink and deftly transfer it into the barrel of the pen. Three or four draws, that would be it.
Spills were minimised and there was no stressing over filling up the pen. Ink fillers were also put to alternative uses by my friends who were animal lovers. One of them used the filler to feed a baby squirrel with milk.
Then came the advent of the ball-point pens and gel pens. Fountain pens were tucked away in old drawers and forgotten. Recently, I bought two fountain pens from a dealer who happened to be a friend. The nibs were carefully adjusted for smooth writing in my Likhita Nama Japa notebooks—in which I wrote mantras for a specified number of times.
Even today, filling pens remains as tricky as always. Instead of using a vest and blotter, I initially used paper tissue for the spills and that was when I was reminded of the ink filler all over again.
Email: sudha.ganesha@gmail.com
