My memories with the Mashek
Not very long ago, when we had no tablets and stylus pens, a reed qalam and wooden mashek were our prized writing tools. This was the time when even a discarded Chelpark ink bottle continued to be the stationery we fondly carried in our school bags. The iconic bottles were repurposed to carry an ink quite different from the one the bottle was created for. The milky ink crafted by mixing water and powdered clay was the lifeblood of our mashek- an indispensable part of the bygone formative schooling.
Mashek or Takhti- a rectangular black wooden slate was our important writing tool to improve the writing of students, especially in government schools. A newly bought Mashek was painted red with yellow lines not suitable for writing with the kind of ink we made. Making mashek writable demanded devotion and patience, unimaginable to the tech-savvy Gen Z. It had to be stripped of its paint, followed by blackening it until resembled a blackboard. I vividly remember, it excited me immersing mine overnight in a small water canal beside my home with some heavy object, like a brick placed on it to keep it underwater. The next day the paint was gone, and so was our worry, baring the wooden surface to be blackened by applying the soot of moonbati, a kerosine lamp or a special piece of wood or pasting it with a black powder acquired from the discarded and leaky radio batteries. It was laborious but thrilling. Our hands and clothes bore the marks of labour, yet our parents didn’t scold us for these unique stains. Even then, the labour wasn’t over and the mashek wasn’t yet ready to be written on. Every time we were to write, we’d rub it with the smooth margin of broken pieces of porcelain kosher cups or syrup bottle bottoms, polishing it until its surface mirrored our eager faces.
With mashek resting on the floor, we held the piece of the cup in our hands and rigrously rubbed every inch while humming some song or prayer. Lines were drawn using a piece of thread, which was no less than a fine art. One needed to be precise in alignment and make sure that the drops of ink didn’t fall from the moistened thread, making the mashek shabby. Coiled around the index finger, we dipped the thread into the ink to let the fibre absorb the clay ink. With utmost care, the uncoiled and tout thread was made to touch the glossy Mashek and gently pulled off the slate to create perfect and almost equidistant lines likes those of notebook.
One wobble, one drip, and our canvas would be ruined. The girls mastered this art best. Apart from drawing the usual lines, they would draw extra lines slightly away from the margins to embellish them with floral designs, cunningly and beautifully reducing their writing space.
My sister’s rebellion against her oversized mashek became a family legend/joke. From the attic of our house, she grabbed a saw and began to saw her mashek to shorten it and relieve herself of the burden of writing extra lines. As the teeth of the saw reached almost the middle, the alignment of the cut disappointed her and made her pull the saw out of the slit. She preferred to leave it half-cut rather than carry a Mashek with an inappropriate shape. This jagged half-cut turned her into the butt of joke—grandma scolded her, we teased her, and even at school, she couldn’t escape the giggles.
It took some moments for the lines to dry and writing to begin. We sat cross-legged with Mashek resting on a thigh and the left hand holding the handle, and we were engrossed in writing. The top line carried 786 in Arabic numerals at its centre, followed by a passage in English on one face and in Urdu on the other. Our pens were whittled from maize stems, nibs intricately carved with shaving blades that didn’t spare the fingers from peeling, leaving the stains of blood and ink. A small slit in the centre of the nib was created perhaps to retain the ink after every dip. Soft leaves, neej in the local dialect, plucked from the schoolyard, were our erasers. Checking mashk was a morning ritual in the school after the morning assembly. In front of every row or two stood a teacher to quickly check them. Lucky were the students who were in a row assigned to less strict and lazy teachers who didn’t check very keenly. Some of us would trick the teacher by showing the same mashk for days together.
The teacher rarely noticed it unless any naughty classmate or schoolmate told them about the mischief. Some would write it on one side only and, in a rush, flip it very quickly when their turn came so that the teacher couldn’t notice. If caught, mashk served the purpose of beating often leading to its split. The teacher would give a few rupees extra to students to buy new ones. That was a blessing in disguise.
Today, when I watch children clung to expensive modern gadgets, writing leisurely on them, I am often filled with nostalgia and reminded of the earthy scent of our clay ink and neej, that chorus of scratching echoing in the classroom, the stains of ink and blood. Mashek taught the lessons of patience, perseverance and creativity that no app or gadget can teach.
Hakeem Rouf Faculty at Aakash Educational Institute, Srinagar.
