Krishna was late waking up and I had to constantly remind him of the time as he got ready to go to school. I rushed him to the door, to catch the school bus on time. This took away some energy that could have made the start of the 50000 word writing task easier. But start I did and carried on for more than two hours, stopping just to complete a hurried job or two. All else was forgotten, as I rekindled the memories of the planning I had to do, when I first went to Nigeria,Africa in May1994.

I open the windows to let in bright sunshine streaming in as early as 6am. There is a strong cool sea breeze blowing and it is a welcoming change from the sweltering heat. Winter is here again and the birds will make their appearance soon. I want to record their first arrival and share it with my family. There is some affinity I feel, for the free creatures following the tune of nature and the seasons. We humans are controlled by our thoughts and the power of the mind, that at times force us into circumstances not attuned with nature.

Three days and eight thousand words later, I am still stressed at the technicalities. It would be nice if the writing could be just uploaded and held for safekeeping. I think a writer should not be bogged down by the stress of keeping the writing safe. It does take away some of the energy that could be better used to hone the writing skills.
Anyway, I learned to make a copy and save it in a tiny memory chip. It still amazes me that this tiny rectangle could hold so much. I admit that I couldn’t do without technology.

I am trying to get as close as I can to twenty thousand words in the first week itself. I am a careful and safe person. With Krishna’s half yearly exams starting on the fifteenth, I have to give some attention to that issue. With just a month at school, a lot of the coaching work falls back on the parent. Shouldn’t studies be done the same way as food; a chewing and digesting process to assimilate it in slowly? Obviously this has not been the case now. It is instant teaching to be followed by instant study.

I have finished the first fifteen thousand words. I wanted the first twenty thousand words to be an account of the arrival and initial process of settling down. Then, I wanted to spend the next twenty thousand words on the years we spent there. And the last ten thousand words were to be about the years after Nigeria, when we were at heart still holding on to our life there. I am still in the first year and racking my memory to bring out recollections of those initial years in Asaba town. It was not an easy period at all.

I am getting closer to the 20000 word mark. Today, as early as 4.30am, I was at the computer typing. For the past two days, I have done more than 3000 words each day. I still had the afternoon and evening yesterday, after rushing with my writing in the morning. I am typing very fast now. Though I didn’t learn typing, I am doing it in an automatic way without much of a strain. Sometimes a nerve in the palm swells up and then I realise I might have overdone it in my enthusiasm. I am surprised myself!

I have completed the 21000 mark. I think it has been good going. My concern is I still do not trust technology. I hope I do not lose all the writing to some technical problem. I surely could not have gone this far, if I was writing manually, so some credit goes to the efficiency of the computer. And with my rather characteristic scrawl in script, even I wouldn’t have the patience to go through and rewrite anything. I wasn’t planning on novel writing, but couldn’t resist a chance to write a book, as this venture is.

The project I have embarked on is time consuming and to fit it into the day’s schedule is tricky. Until now, I have had enough time for all my jobs and some more to think about life. Now, I find myself rushing about to get things done, after spending hours writing. And I want to put in a lot more, before I forget.
Once the memory goes to a different time space, bringing it back to reality is a gradual process. I want to stay back and recreate that time and the flow of events that happened years ago.

I haven’t set foot outside the apartment block for the past twenty days. I am constantly writing or working around the house. It gets dark quite early, now that winter is supposed to have set in. By the day, it is really hot and sunny and we still use the air conditioners. I remember that last year, we switched off all air conditioners by the end of October. And we restarted them only in April. Global warming is delaying the start of winter here, perhaps!
I am at 26666 words. The multiple sixes fascinated me and I stopped writing.

I have completed thirty thousand words. It has been a very intense process and very satisfying to recall the old times and the lessons learnt during those first years, in a new country. I think Bahrain was easier to settle in, because of those years of adjusting and adapting in Nigeria. The innovations in cooking, we had to do because we didn’t have access to all our Indian ingredients there, still helps me here. After a few hours of writing, I can rush into the kitchen and in a matter of minutes get ready a hearty meal for three.

There is no time for any other writing except carrying on with this mammoth script. Letters have to be written and replied to and I type urgently to complete the 100words for the day. Krishna is having exams in the coming week. I coax him to carry on without my supervision. I do not like being disturbed from the flow of thought and being in that period of the past, to recount it for the present in writing. At night, I am going over the events of those years in my mind, to see if I have left anything out.

It is a pleasant wintry morning. There is bright sunshine, but a slight chillness in the air. I bring in the plastic pots in which tiny plants are growing into the living room, near the windows to get some sunshine. The sunshine doesn’t get to the balcony at all, in this land of everlasting sunshine. As the area getting sunlight from the window changes, I move the pots too. After 11.30am, there is no more direct sunlight in the room and the pots go back to the balcony till the next morning, when the procedure is repeated.Trying!

During the weekends, it is very difficult to find time to progress on the writing. With exams starting this coming week, the coaxing to study continues. Hindi as usual is an area, where I have to use all skills to get the father and the son at the table. They both find excuses as it is an area of conflict. But this time one of their sessions of revision went off smoothly and I am hoping the next and the last will go on without my intervention. If I intervene, I am accused of interfering. All for a good cause!

I couldn’t write a word today to get to the 40000 mark. This weekend has been a gruelling one of coaching and demanding that my thirteen year old put in more responsibility towards thorough studying. In our times an eighty per cent score was thought reasonable. Now the scores expected are higher and there is more pressure on both children and their parents. Whoever said exams are times are stressful for children, they are stressful to the parents too. I pore over biology which I haven’t studied at school, so that I could help my son studying it.

I hardly think about what I am writing in 100 words as the other script is so absorbing. Anything short of a five hundred word writing spree seems strange. It also gives you a freedom to elaborate with abandon, without a single thought of limitation that I am so much used to in more than a year of writing for 100words. This is something I can flit through. That is something I have to slog, to reach a satisfying number which makes me feel I am still in control. It is past 9pm and I have forgotten all about dinner.

I am close to forty four thousand words and another six thousand to go, before I reach the fifty thousand word target required, to finish the writing task. But I will not stop at fifty thousand words. I will go on to complete what I was planning to write and reach the end of my narration, even if it requires a few ten thousand words more. And save it and hold it to go back to it and rewrite parts of it to my satisfaction. To write about a decade of experiences after another decade has passed, is my task.

In the next two days, I will be finishing my first fifty thousand word script. I have been consumed by this task for the past fortnight and I have found the time to do it, well ahead of a month. If you had asked me, when I started it, I could not have given a definite answer. Maybe it is possible, if I tried hard and spent all my spare time at it, would have been my answer. If I had a choice, I would not have chosen this month for it. With Krishna’s half yearly exams going on!

All evening I have been writing and I have chores to get done still. I am close to 48500 words and my story or my experiences, that I am relating is gradually drawing to a close and I feel a terrible loss. This productive endeavour has taken away a lot of boredom that comes from living indoors, almost all the time. I have to fill up that gap of time with something else, that will also be as intense as this writing has been for me, these twenty or so days. I can read and relive the experience anytime now.

I reached the fifty thousand mark at 10.30pm. on the 18th of November, one day in advance. Didn’t dance over it, but it was sort of satisfying and I am still writing to finish, what I have started. A cloudy day and I had time to switch on the TV in the morning for a change. I quite like seeing the cheerful Ellen on her shows, though I don’t watch the whole show sitting, but keep wandering off in the middle of it for something else. The sun is back and I feel its cheering influence too.

Two more exams to go and there is no break between them. To coax a tired child to study just once again, for the exam on the next day is a task. A short break turns into a longer one and it is evening already and just a few hours before bedtime. Then it is a rush to go through every thing necessary to update memory and get a good night’s sleep. Then you realise, he hasn't had any exercise through the day and all the spare time had been used up at the computer or with the ipod.

On the 25th of November, I have to upload my script for a word count and will be an official winner if it is accepted as a fifty thousand word script. I have stopped at a few hundred words more than that and there is the job of finishing what I have started, but I have let it wait till I find the right time for it. Unless there is a deadline, the writing still stays incomplete.
Tomorrow, the last of the exams will be over for Krishna and I will get very little time at the computer once again.

Staying at home for a month without any outside contact has given me time to think. In India, I was never really this alone, even when I was cooped up inside the house for lengthy periods of time. It was all voluntary, for I did not have any work to be completed outside, whereas there were a lot of jobs inside the house. But there were people calling on the phone and the sales girls, who kept disturbing you during the day, so ultimately you are never really alone. And you are left thinking, where did all the time go?

Here things are different. Though there is more work around the house, there is time for everything else. When the school and office goers have left the house, I have all the time in the world till they return. No ring of telephones, nobody at the door disturbing you to ask for directions, no sales girls with their interesting wares, no vegetable sellers on the road, nothing at all. I see people passing by as I look out of the window, but I am all alone in my world. Not that this is a bad thing, but a different experience.

Krishna is having a week of holidays. I was planning to get up later than usual in the morning, but was disturbed by sounds and woke up to find everyone was awake earlier than usual and at the computer. I rushed to get breakfast, before Chandra left for office. My friend was online and it was some time since I had caught up with her. But I postponed talking, to a later and more convenient time and rushed on with breakfast. She was still online, when I came to write and this was put off for an hour long chat.

Krishna was invited by a friend for a movie. We agreed, provided he was picked up from the apartment. His friend said that they would pick him up from outside the supermarket nearby, as it was a landmark they knew. We agreed it was easier, but didn’t want our son waiting alone near a supermarket and asked him to refuse the invitation. When they heard the reason, they promised to pick him up from a nearer landmark, the Gosi building. We objected as we couldn’t see him leave. But they had arrived and I had to let go.

I spoke to a friend about life here as compared to living in Asaba,Nigeria. Not that Okwe was a village without facilities. But it was laid back and a lot greener but less lively, when compared to living in an apartment in the busy extended Manama area. Since I am not part of the activity around the building, but a mere spectator in my spare time, the isolation is almost similar. I used to walk around the compound for exercise there; I use a stationery bike here. I used the telephone a lot more there, to connect with friends.

I have a problem with word spell check. When I was just getting to sleep, I remembered that I hadn’t really thought about the spelling of stationary, when I typed stationary bike in my last 100 words. I had a doubt that stationery was what I had spelt it and it was absolutely shocking to realise how easily it had slipped the spell check, without any thought of the context in which it had been used. I was so confident about the word spell check, that I had given up some of my power by trusting a mechanical process.

The family in India would have reached home after a reunion of sorts at a wedding in a neighbouring town. My mother would be the oldest of the family at almost eighty, to grace the occasion with her presence. There would be nieces and nephews coming in with their families. It would be a first introduction for some of their children to the extended family. There would be exclamations at how tall some of the children had grown. Most have surpassed the height of their parents much to their delight. Ailments would be discussed and remedies suggested. Truly energising trips!

We went to see the ruins of the Riffa fort. The fort or most of it was still intact and we spent a good two hours looking around. There were only foreign visitors in one or two small batches. We marvelled at the ventilation system of the old castle. Two layers of plastered designs on the outer and inner portion of the thick walls with a gap in between them provided filtered air and light to the interior. The intricate pattern of the design and the different patterned designs of every ventilator (there were many) was remarkable. Nice plaster work!

The doors of some of the fort rooms led to small enclosures with a tiny window high up on the wall. A holding place for Prisoners maybe! The doors were carved wooden ones with wooden latches holding the two parts of it together. I was surprised to see that the holders were similar to the ones, I had seen in old houses in Kerala but more intricately carved. Maybe there were Keralite carpenters working for the king even then. There were carved comfortable wooden seats in the outer lobby like open places, looking out to the courtyard. Very interesting place!