The Deccan Wispy …. A mid-year model from Deccan Pens, Hyderabad …

Aah … back to fountain pens … and it is all serendipity … so to say, but what to say … for the last six months or so (huh…when I actually checked, I was surprised myself … ) it has been about second hand books and travel books and hunting books and so on and … I was thinking about pens and one is always in my pocket … but I was getting sort of desperate … I haven’t gone without pens or writing about pens for this long … but I didn’t have new pens to post or boast about …

That changed in the first week of August when Hari came to Hyderabad on work for a couple of days … it has almost become ritualized now that we take off on one of the evenings and visit Deccan Pens at Abids and then we head out for drinks and dinner … Deccan Pens is constant, but the restaurants change every time … this time it was Waterfront on Necklace Road …

The visit to Deccan Pens yielded one new model, an old archival model not seen before (at least not by us!  We are true blue Deccan connoisseurs you see…), another combo model, and a variation of the Deccan Majaz … Hari bought quite a few pens … actually more than quite a few actually … this is Hari’s haul that day …

I didn’t buy a single pen that day … I didn’t know why … but I bought three bottles of inks and some colour colour gel pens for Shruti …

But that new thin pen (the ones in the red satin pouch in the picture above …) stayed in mind … after a couple of weeks, I felt I should have that pen … but I was not sure whether there would be one piece left for me to buy, because Hari seemed to have bought all the available pieces at Abids … nonetheless, I called up Zubair at Deccan Pens, Secunderabad to find out if he had any of those thin pens available … he said he had that model with him … haa … that was some relief … at the back of my mind I was somehow confident that I would get at least one piece of that new thin pen …

I went there the same evening … Zubair showed me the brown Wispy … and a little while later, I thought I spied him handling a similar green coloured pen … and asked him to show it to me … waah … the Wispy green pen was a real surprise … I hadn’t expected that there would be a green one too … we didn’t see that at Abids … and as it happens usually there were other pens too that I couldn’t just hold back from buying … but first, the thin pen … the Deccan people haven’t given this model a name but I am calling it the Deccan Wispy … it is thin and light, that’s why … (Hari calls it the Datoon) …

So, anyway, here are the photos of the pens … I don’t think I have captured the colour of the brown pen very well … it appears orange-ish in flash-aided photos and more actual colour in flash-less photos … but it is slightly more browner than the brown you see in the flash-less photos … 

The first thing I noticed, apart from the slender-ness of the pen, was the clip … the clip comes straight down from the cap jewel and does a ‘u’ and then straightens out … ok, this style is unique … normally clips stick almost close to the cap surface and whatever little gap is there is closed at the end either by either side horizontal folds or vertical end roll … so that the pen can be clipped to the pocket … that’s what clips are for, anyway … for clipping … if you look at the picture of the clip shown sideways, you can see there is considerable gap between cap surface and clip … so this ‘u’ in the middle helps the clip to clip ... if this ‘u’ wasn’t there, there would be many a slip between the clip and the clipping … he he …

The other thing is the MEBSONS 61 imprinted on the clip … we wondered and we were told that (I am using Hari’s words) “Mebsons (an old pen manufacturing company in Mumbai, now they make only some ball points etc, they still have a dealer on AR street in Mumbai, here is some interesting information with mention of Mebsons: link ) had made a slim ballpoint a long while back. Deccan had the spare clips left over and they decided to put the stock to use to make some really slim fountain pens. So, that was the Mebsons connection.”

The most notable part is the exquisite slender long tapering shape of the pen … the barrel is as slender as one of those Parker ink cartridges … and look at the section … ooh … such mastery over the craft of shaping the pen … this has to be Deccan … their chhaap is unmistakable … Deccan does this section designing beautifully … notice the ridge right at the top near the nib … gives you the grip and prevents fingers sliding … in other pens they have this hourglass shaped section that serves the same function …

For this pen, they have put in the Wality nib … the ones that Hari bought had Ambitious nibs ... Hari was surprised when I told him that mine had Wality nibs … apparently, Wality at present don’t make slim pens, but at some point they used to make and the surplus nibs might have found their way to Deccan … I am just guessing