On his Birthday, I struggled to come up with the idea for a birthday gift. I started by listing the traditional gifting stuff.
- DeO? Implies that he has BO, which he doesn’t; and he already has some sort of crazy musky spray that makes me wonder why men first bathe then spray themselves with something that makes them smell all sweaty.
- Wallet? He’s got one already, and accept it or not, an empty gift wallet can stress a guy out, making him think how he can fill it up. As a Birthday gift, it doesn’t click.
- Belt? So what might I be implying? Cinch it and tuck it in? It could’ve come in handy a couple of a years ago when he had kick-started his midriff expansion project, but he had quickly dropped it, and he is now fit and smart.
Honestly, I tried coming up with something that would really be useful to him…something that won’t go the way the keyboard and the roller-skates went – but I came up with nothing!
But then, he can read me like I were a first grade English text being read by an English Literature Professor. So, on the morning of his Birthday, he brought this stone pen-stand that he had bought from a fair years ago, and asked me to draw or paint upon it.
And so I did. It took me hours, peering over the 2.5″x 4″ stone-canvas, and painting upon the not-so-smooth surface of the stone, but the results were heartening. Note that these four characters weren’t sketched elsewhere on paper…they were born on this pen stand, for this pen stand 🙂
The balding worker with the Smiley Hat and the Pretty Girl with a kitten.
Young girl in hat with a cat and a blond man with a cellphone
Man with the mobile phone and the dancing Indian girl
The Indian dancer and the balding man in the smiley hat
And finally, with the pencils 🙂
The Gift 🙂
He loved the gift. And then of course, there was the halwa, his favorite sweet-dish to sweeten the gift some more 🙂
Shafali's Caricatures, Portraits, and Cartoons 