Ink is good for you!

Remember those nice Hero and Wing Sung pens you used in school? Graduating to fountain pens was a major status upgrade for us at age 12. After all, everybody knows pencils are for kid’s right? I remember getting an 8 Rupee Camlin fountain pen with Royal Blue ink, which got me through many weeks of writing after developing a leak. These pens were at best shoddy affairs with cheap nibs and had to be filled with eyedroppers that came free with a bottle of ink, provided you were nice to the shopkeeper. Then I chanced upon the more expensive Chinese pens, notably Wing Sung and Hero, with the cool hooded nib with a ‘Star Trek’ logo that was silky smooth. But of course, being young entailed carrying a mandatory bunch of blotting paper sheets, an ‘ink rubber’ – hard blue erasers that required a great degree of expertise to operate, couple that with forty other boys and you’ll get a broken nib every other day, along with the regulation ink stained school uniforms. So we ended up using only the cheapest pens available. I remember using Artex and Camlin pens the most, while the red and gold Wing Sung was reserved for examinations. On a birthday I received a Parker Vector that cost a full 90 Rupees. The nib was smoother than anything I had ever written with, though it drew fatter lines, which were not really all that great for my handwriting.
Gradually we discovered that you could use Black ink for exams as well, along with another shade of blue that you only got in certain shops, and that blue ink was called Turquoise Blue, made by a company called Chelpark. This blue was almost esoteric: not sky blue yet with a brilliant vividness about it. Anybody using Turquoise Blue, or possessing a Parker pen was immediately considered cooler by his classmates, and that’s the way it was in school.
By the time we sat for our high school examinations at the XII standard, I had already shifted to the infamous ballpoint pen, which, I must admit, lacked the character of fountain pens. My handwriting, of course, had by then become suitably scribbly, legible enough to be allowed inside the examination hall, scrawled enough to obscure minor spelling mistakes.
Time flew, and my old Parker Vectors sought refuge in the cupboard in the Kolkata house. Then the bug bit me once more. After reading about handmade fountain pens in Hyderabad, on the fountain pen network, I walked into the famed Deccan Pen Stores in the city to get leads for an article I was filing. The rest, as they won’t say, was present continuous. I chanced upon a beautiful ebonite pen, made by the in-house staff at the store, which behaved exactly like a microtip pen, writing a fine, delicate line from the point the pen touched the paper.



This has, incidentally, become my everyday pen, filled with blue-black ink. Then, last week I relived school days and got hold of a dark green Hero 329 fountain pen, with the hooded nib. A trip to Deccan Pen Stores resulted in two more bottles of ink, including – wonder of wonders – turquoise blue Chelpark ink! Not only are fountain pens great to write with, they are better for the environment as well, since a pen would last for many years if handled carefully, unlike the ugly plastic use-and-throw affairs of today. Looks like I’m hooked on to fountain pens for good, and that’s a good thing.