The Brahmam Duofold - Big Orange

Dear friends...

I have resumed posting after a long long time…lots of things happened in between which kind of prevented me from posting on a regular basis as I was doing before…that means I was not off reading and writing as such, but somehow something went awry and this kind of lethargy engulfed me and sometimes even when I had strongly made up my mind to write, I would sit there staring at the screen…anyway, hopefully all that would be gone with this re-start…during this time some of my friends would urge me to write and post something and after sometime, they too gave up…but this time, I am determined, I am sitting here in front of my laptop typing this out...I am back…

This post is about a pen that I instantly desired the moment I saw it...this is the pen I’d like to call the Brahmam Duofold Big Orange. I was at Deccan Pen Stores, Abids Branch, Hyderabad, on a mission some time back; and after that, as is customary with me, I asked Mr Wasim if he had anything special to show me…and he took out his special folder and showed me this pen…I fell in love with this pen at first sight…I was shocked and surprised (honestly!!)…I asked him the price and when he told me, my face kind of fell…I wanted this pen desperately and I was in a wretched condition, financially (I still am!!); but I think I lost my senses…I was not in a position to listen to my heart, my head, my conscience…anything at all…I told him confidently that I haven’t brought the money, and that I would buy it and that he should keep it in reserve for me till I call him and tell him that I can’t buy it…Mr Wasim knows me quite well in this sense because I have enacted this drama once before, but the cost of that pen was only a fraction of the cost of this pen…so, what to do now…the only recourse was to beg, borrow, or steal…the only option that appeared sane was to borrow…and so I borrowed vehemently from different sources and managed to put together the total cost of the pen…and triumphantly went and bought the pen, without even giving a thought to how I was going to repay the loans…I had the pen with me, that was enough…

I called it the Brahmam Duofold Big Orange…it is an eyedropper, made of celluloid and looks like a Big Red (Parker Duofold Red Permanite Lucky Curve Pen...look it up!!)…I always wanted to have a Big Red, but when I realised how much it cost, I put my desire in the backburner…and this was the closest that I could get to the Big Red…this is the Big Orange…I loved the orange colour and the natural black patterns on orange…the nib as the picture would show is Iridium Tipped Broad and is a US made nib…the name ‘Brahmam’ is engraved on the clip and ‘Brahmam Pen’ on the barrel…it has three gold coloured rings on the cap; a broad one in the middle, and two thinner ones around it…Mr Wasim told me that the clip and rings were ‘gold filled’…the cap jewel and the barrel cap are in black, and I think are made of ebonite…because discussions with a couple of fountain pen makers on celluloid fountain pens revealed that celluloid pipes are usually closed with ebonite caps to make fountain pen caps and barrels…

This pen is now more than 6 months old and you can make that out by the partly faded imprint on the barrel…and in the initial days I think the cap fell on a hard surface, (I don’t know when this happened, I don’t remember) and chipped the edge…I didn’t realise this and I happened to see this suddenly and couldn’t do anything about it…couldn’t have got a replacement even if I was willing to pay for another cap…these are designer pens…only a few are made and sold out as soon as they reach the shop…I felt sad, for the pen…such a lovely pen and this chip on the cap…this made me love the pen even more…it had a flow problem initially, but the Deccan people got it rectified and it now writes like a dream…