Column

On my writing table at home is a wire tray of pebbles a friend sent me. The oddest of shapes, sizes and colours. But they do have two things in common — a marvellous smoothness and the fact that they fit within my palm perfectly.

As a child, pebbles and I had an intimate relationship. I even slept with my favourite pebble of the moment. In fact, as I continued to scavenge pebbles from building sites, ditches and roadsides, my parents would look at each other and nod happily at the thought that between them they had created a geologist!

As I grew up, pebble love lapsed only to resurface again in my thirties. At an artist’s retreat I went to in America, I met a much older lady Rhoda Stamell. Rhoda to me epitomised chutzpah. She had driven about 600 miles on her own to get there. She had a gentleman friend but lived on her own. She was alone but not lonely. She had a life.

But I was to discover all of that much later. What I do remember is that first vision of her — Rhoda seated under a Chinese elm tree with three pie dishes placed on the table before her. The dishes were lined with chamois leather and contained grades of ashes grit. As I watched she put a few pebbles into one and her fingers worked the chamois and grit against the pebbles smoothening the rough areas and the craters on the surface to an even finish.

I was fascinated and soon I was part of the coterie that gathered around that table every evening. When the gnats came out, we lit lemongrass-scented candles. But our fingers never paused and neither did our minds and thoughts.

Rhoda was almost double my age and at 33, I was grappling with understanding many hypothetical situations that would one day be my reality, from the banal — at what age does one put aside puff sleeves? to the practical — so should I think of a pension fund now? to the profound — what does one do when one’s children leave home?

In comparison, what I offered Rhoda was very little. Though she claims that was the beginning of her literary life... I pulled a notice off a board and left it in her room saying, “Enter this contest! If Mary Wesley could become an author in her sixties, so can you…”

Rhoda did.

I often look at the wire tray of pebbles. In their naked glow is an aura of wisdom and complicity that has seldom come my way thereafter.

Anita Nair is the author of the novels 'A Better Man', 'Ladies Coupe and Mistress'.