Approaching Eye Level. Of hatches and squiggles

Whatever happened to hobbies, asked my friend T. Nobody seems to have them anymore.

People run but then that’s deathly serious and ends in photos of 5Ks and 10Ks. People make pretty things and are told to scale up, don’t waste time, fail fast and other such sweaty, TED-y aphorisms. And for creative types, it is now a constant tension that everything you touch must succeed and bear enviable fruit.

T and I were discussing a common friend, a highly creative person who seemed to have no hobbies. All her gifts (and she had many) seemed to end in some search for a revenue model. Which perhaps is better than T and me, who are constantly cooking up schemes marked by the absence of revenue models.

But before we started discussing our common friend, the thing that prompted our noble tut-tutting was my new acquisition: an adult colouring book. Polite people around me have tried not to make fun of this purchase. Perhaps I should gift it to my mother currently in a wheelchair, was one suggestion. Perhaps I should write a trend piece, came another suggestion. To the latter I even pretended to agree. Yes, yes I must write a trend piece. A thing a former editor of mine used to call a “more and more people are” piece. (This is of course in high contrast from a ‘think piece’, which is about “less and less people”).

I like my adult colouring book quite a bit. It’s a tall book filled with pages of numbered circles. Follow the colour schemes the book suggests and the squint-inducing pages are transformed into rather cool portraits of famous types. Halfway through my first page I was startled to realise that the black hatches and squiggles were turning into Jim Morrison. Then I went out and bought a colour pencil box and got myself an Audrey Hepburn in shades of pink and purple. A couple of hours or less on each page gives me a feeling that is both tickle and satisfaction.

My friend T who has always been a bit ahead-of-the-trend-curve kind of girl actually discovered adult colouring books many years ago in Mcleodganj. She took her thangka -themed colouring book down to the plains. Her family giggled but she was mock-proof as she bought pencils, crayons and watercolours and went at colouring with fervour.

This fervour reminds me of a previous state of being. Of being 8, 12, 14 and told quite clearly that I can’t draw, I can’t paint and man, my maps were rather ghastly. This didn’t seem tragic at the above-mentioned ages. Only that I’d have to get my jollies from other things. Which I was getting anyway. Scrapbooks, stamp collections, dolls’ clothes, puppets, ugly origami. It never stopped. Adults feared the rampage I could run with a pair of scissors, a pot of glue, glitter or a blank notebook.

The very first thing I ever wrote was as an eight-year-old feeling the need to express myself in writing about a paper rose I’d made. I was 23 before anyone told me that I should think of writing seriously. Seriously, as in you should think of earning a living from it. I have ever since and on most days, thank the many circumstances and accidents of birth that led to this piece of advice. But there are some days I wish writing didn’t involve career decisions and adulthood.

My colouring book seems to be a return to pointless activity. Let’s clarify that. Pointless activity which is not just television. Because I have a problem. I watch a lot of television but can’t seem to just watch it. Friends and relatives staying over are now reconciled to seeing me clean the house and do other random things while treating the new award-winning series as radio. I know one other friend who has a similar problem because she was brought up strictly and told that her hands could never be idle. Even in the thick of a demanding PhD, she couldn’t switch off with mindless television. She had to knit or crotchet or prune her plants while whatever show was running. It’s been some years since we both left our mothers’ houses but here we are unable to sit still. I have a mother in a wheelchair who can’t sit still either. An adult colouring book is too slow for her style.

These days though I have Jane the Virgin on and the colouring book in front of me. For the first time in year, I am not sorting my clothes or dusting my shelves or rearranging the masalas. I am not at the point yet where I can just watch television but I may get there. My colouring is patchy. It’s unlikely to get better. I like my colouring book quite a bit but I don’t love it. I may abandon this thing soon. (Though there is one with Japanese cats that I may get before I abandon it altogether.) I think it’s a gateway hobby.

I may knit. I may unravel. Be warned.

Nisha Susan is a writer and editor of the feminist website The Ladies Finger ; @chasingiamb

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