The Line
I used to teach him things, he would use in his school, before he actually started going to school. I felt, it would prepare him, for what’s he going to study there.

For this chap, even holding a chalk was like holding a thing from a fantasy novel coming to real. He would stare at it for long after holding it in his tiny fingers. Sometimes he would hold it tight, so much that I had tough time rubbing the chalk’s dust off his fingertips. Sometimes, he would just hold it softly, but not so soft that the chalk would fall.

He then would like to get the feel of the chalk’s shape, at least that’s how I could analyze it… He would twist the chalk around itself, turn it upside down. I made sure that I was giving him a chalk of a different color every time when we met. He would be amazed equally regardless the chalk’s color, that I would ask him to hold, he would welcome it with the same wide open eyes, gazing at the chalk.

He had a black rectangular slate. I though of giving him a board, as for a child of his age, I was expecting him to make the walls of the house, his canvass… But he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t draw a thing, unless I was in front of him. Sometimes the slate would be left with no space to draw anymore, sometimes it was just me, who would stop him, but I don’t recall a single day, when he stopped, by himself… until that day.

Until that day, I don’t recall a single picture, or the imagery he would draw on the slate, picture – too orthodox a word to use… Never in the worlds he would draw on that small slate, you would see things that are around you. Nor, you would see things that he was growing up with…

That day, instead of handing him over the slate, I took it in my hands. Held it in my left hand, in my right hand was a chalk, white – conventional white. I drew a straight, vertical line, on the right hand side of the slate. I carefully left a lot of space on the left side of the line I drew. Then I gave him, the slate and the chalk. For the first time, instead of staring at the chalk, he was staring at the slate. Hopefully, he was staring at the line, or maybe he was staring in the empty side of the slate… Then I asked him to draw a line just like the one I had drawn for him. The next moment, he drew it. There was a smile on my face as he was looking at me with his big beautiful eyes. He then handed me over the slate, and the chalk. And then he kept staring at me… waiting for me to ask him to draw, something else, from the little that I could draw on a slate of everything around me or maybe of the things I could remember myself drawing, when I was not drawing what was around me…