Exercise for failing writers: Describe an ordinary character, which comes across as boring and mundane, in an interesting manner.
Ans:
Mr. Barry leads an ordinary life. So ordinary in fact, that
you would barely notice his existence even if he was your next-door neighbour.
He has a typically forgettable face, no charming or disarming features to talk
about, and no distinctive quality about his person or personality. Everything
from his name to his shoes and umbrellas are extremely ordinary. He hardly has
anything interesting to say, and he could care less about what exceptional
things were going on around him. He doesn’t really see the need for any
improvement in his ordinary house. It has an ordinary couch and sofa set, a
very ordinary wooden table, an ordinary rug and an ordinary fireplace that is
usually turned off. If you happen to peek into his house, and it is an
extremely rare occurrence that you would care enough to do so, you’d see a
perfectly ordinary kitchen with little to spare. His bedroom upstairs has a
single bed, a dresser and a closet. There is nothing of any distinction or
importance that might make you wonder about him in any way.
Each morning, he gets up at 7, takes his bath, dresses in
greys or browns, and heads downstairs to have his breakfast. One hard-boiled
egg and a single buttered slice of bread accompany his tea. He neatly cleans
his place-mat and teacup before leaving for work. His car is a typical sedan
you would see on any road, with the colour so faded that it’s essentially
colorless. Not transparent, mind you, but just an unidentifiable colour, somewhere
on the scale between grey and brown and specks of red. He drives carefully, and
seems to enjoy blending in with the rest of the cars on the highway. His office
is a plain and simple desk-chair-cubicle, and he has requested not to have any
technological annoyance within his reach. If you care enough, you could read
the sign overhead on the main street, and see that it is a Law firm. He spends
his day reading catalogued archives of old cases and making notes in boring
brown ledgers in his neat small handwriting. His lunch is a simple cucumber
slice sandwich taken with mineral water. At the end of the day, he drives home
listening to classical music on the radio. He turns on the porch light as he
comes in, and every alternate day he waters his 8 pots of mundane creeping
plants. Today is not the plant-watering day. He picks up the newspaper by his
door, and chucks it directly into the recycle bin. He changes into his night
clothes, prepares his usual supper of buttered bread, boiled vegetables, and
canned meat chunks. From exactly 7pm to 9pm, Mr. Barry watches television. He
likes to see some action on the sports channel, then on to the business news
drawl, and finally he watches the weather report for the next day. He turns off
the television, satisfied that nothing extraordinary about the world and its
goings on has reached him in his ordinariness. He goes downstairs to switch off
lights, checks the lock on his front door, climbs back upstairs and gets ready
for bed. He is fast asleep around 10pm.
Mr. Barry would be quite unhappy to be noticed by you. He
would also feel uncomfortable if you were found peeking into his living room,
or trying to focus your binoculars into his bedroom windows. He prefers to be
left alone while shopping for his usual groceries, and if any of you people
come up to him to say hello, he’d rather avoid looking into your eyes and
responding. He values personal privacy above all other things, and he is
grateful that his is not invaded often.
People like Mr. Barry give authors a hard time trying to
make their lives sound interesting. You cannot imagine him to be a wizard or a
stranded alien from another planet (although that seems to be the case). Perhaps you think he’s solving some important
case at his workplace. No, nothing like that. Mr. Barry has made it a point to
work only in tax or insurance related cases. If anything remotely unusual comes
his way, he likes to pick up the file and leave it at his colleagues’ desk to
work on. People in his office are grateful for having him. They can place all
mundane and boring tasks on his desk, and he’s more than happy to work on them.
The neighbours too would be grateful for having him live amongst them, if they
ever noticed him, because he always takes out trash on time, waters his plants,
shovels his driveway, does not have annoying kids screaming down the street,
nor does he have a gossiping wife who is always hosting barbeques. The cashier
at the grocery store is especially happy to have him as her customer. He
usually buys the same stuff and gives exact change. He doesn’t bother taking
the receipts, so she simply pulls it out and throws it in the bin under her
counter. The mailman always sighs with relief when he comes across Mr. Barry’s
postbox. There is never any post, so his task is easy.
Mr. Barry probably has never bothered anyone in his entire
life, and I suppose one day he’d grow old and sick, and would die quietly.
Although, I wonder if people will be bothered enough to come to his funeral
when that happens. Sometimes, I often wonder if he is happy the way he is. When
I peek into his living room during his TV watching time, I see him smile at
random infomercials on the shopping tv, or nod at the official looking guy
telling us about bad weather tomorrow. At times like these, I feel Mr. Barry
has surrounded himself with the comfort and happiness that is enough for him.
So, you see... if you peek inside, you might get bored. But if you ever get
caught by Mr. Barry when you’re prowling around his mundane plants and pots
under his porch light, well... that
maybe an interesting story.
