At least that’s what I want it to mean, yearn it to mean. Because as a kid, I was the opposite of uninhibited, I was ‘ininhibited’ , yes I know it’s not how it’s spelt, but the error is mainly to show the degree of my inhibition. I would often stay frozen at one place while the world moved around me in its worldly fashion, but it evaded me for some reason. I would not know when to move, when to speak petrified that any movement would make me noticeable, I hated being noticeable. But I also disliked being ignored. I remember this one time, some school seniors had come to mind our class ( Upper Kindergarten) while the teacher was away. They picked a child from one of the front rows and started dancing with her and pampering her, and I remember being insanely jealous. I wanted to be in her place, but I would have also despised being the centre of attention.
My thick glasses were like the doors to a solitary confinement, I liked confinement. I was so silent as a kid, my mum had to look for me all over the house. My myopia was detected late because I never told my parents that I had difficulty reading from the board. Thanks to our class teacher, who happened to be mum’s friend and used to look out for me, who noticed my squinting and told my mum, that my vision problem was detected in time! I was quite content being dictated the writing on the board ( on the wall) by my benchmate. I think as compensation, I am now quite good at reading the writing on the wall.
But when I reached grade VIIIth something changed, a switch turned on, I don’t know whether by its own volition, by some divine/puerile intervention, but I discovered that balmy prefix to inhibited. I became the leader of a small pack of girls who would often bunk classes and leave school to go find haunted houses, read magazines in the school library or just hang about the school corridor. I found my tribe perhaps, or aged backwards, aqcuiring the taste of all the fine things of childhood, right before my teenage years, a peculiar kind of ‘fomo’.
I continue to be uninhibited, with a few reservations. But I can’t ever hide what I truly feel for long, I feel a pronounced sense of disquiet in not being what I truly want to be. So, in a way, I still carry my lost childhood with me.
Fingers in symphony 