End of the writing hiatus, shifting to Delhi and a book deal
tl;dr: I'm finally writing again
The funny thing with returning to writing after a hiatus as long as a year is that even if I’m ready to write sooner than expected, the attendant embarrassment keeps me from turning to the page. You’d think that, after a book deal, carving out the time to write would be easier, that the pursuit would be less riddled with guilt or a hunger that’s usually driven my writing in the past, but the truth is that writing in a bedroom in a hidden corner of Goa, cycling through hurricanes, various raves, the routine dramas of a relationship, navigating the incessant back and forth of what it means to cohabit with someone, the comfort of familiar faces and unlikely friendships born out of extenuating circumstances that allowed all of us to gravitate towards one another and create a bubble away from the world burning, cushioned by our privilege, cradled in the lap of nature, where it becomes easier to look away from my phone screen, and onto a horizon that stretches out endlessly, are truths that no longer exist. The world seems to have rapidly moved on from the pandemic, although economically and socially, we still bear witness to its effects. Writing about anything at all seems trite, especially since the horrific events that have transpired since October last year, and the televised genocide we’ve been subjected to; the images percolating in my brain, interspersed with ads for boob tape and discounted egg freezing. Every word I write, that any of us write, will be coloured by this reality. Still, I’ll try my best to condense the last year and what my preoccupations have largely been.
Life has hurtled forward at an astounding speed. I’ve returned to Delhi after seven years and amongst the many joys, a few incidents stand out in stark memory. The world asks you to shrink in so many ways everyday— especially if you’re a Brown woman, especially if you’re an Indian Muslim woman— you moderate what you wear, you choose between how much cleavage is okay to show depending on the pin code you’re heading out to, how much leg is allowed, you only are given access to places if there’s a man accompanying you, how much more confident you feel if there’s a man next to you, how much more protected. My entire life, despite my instinct to rebel— against the idea of being a model daughter, girlfriend, wife— is often reduced to my identity as a woman in the most unexpected moments. As I write this, I sit in the third floor apartment I’ve recently sublet with two French girls in a posh locality of New Delhi, with its curated parks and the forest behind and the ceiling to floor glass with the sun beaming through the trees right into my room. Last night, a man I’m seeing came over dressed in his an outfit from the place he hails from. I’m not sure how “Muslim” he presents, all I know is that he looks gorgeous— tall, his broad shoulders, he strides into rooms with the kind of quiet confidence that irks people, he’s charming without being effusive, he can make people feel comfortable without revealing too much about himself, he has moments of self doubt which he has learnt not to project others— traits I like to believe I share with him. I walk with a similar confidence, in defiance, a reminder of how our mere existence has irked people across the country. What’s more frustrating or infuriating than a well-dressed, articulate, intelligent Muslim talking with the confidence of belonging here? Of having earned the seat at the table? We’re in the throes of an early day romance and our cute banter is cut short by a portly man standing on the first floor of the house, who questions us about why we’re entering his house. I tell him I live there and flash the key to him— posturing an innocent confusion I’ve mastered with years of having lived in Delhi and Dubai. He sizes up my friend and I, and then says he’ll take it up with my flatmate tomorrow. I walk in with my eyes to the ground, and my friend follows me in.
Previously, we’d been having some silly skirmish about him not calling me the day I sustained a corneal wound but soon, this affront has dissipated my anger. We feel united against a country, and a world, that rallies for our erasure. The man from the first floor threatens my flatmate and calls the house a brothel and says if they don’t sort it out, he will. Eventually, not much comes off it, and he apologises and now I’m in the same balcony, looking over, strategising my movements, minimising myself, making sure I’m not noticed and I can go about doing things without scrutiny— in my own home, in a place I currently pay rent for. Just yesterday, I sat in the same balcony after I’d done my room up and looked out at the grim Delhi sky and enjoyed that delicious feeling of solitude, of being alone and not being lonely, of finally having arranged a life that’s entirely mine— not my boyfriend’s or my ex-boyfriend’s or my father’s or the many other male figures in my life who’ve come and gone. Another interesting thing to observe is how this blatant disregard for others, especially women, this sort of obnoxious and arrogant entitlement to women’s bodies and time is largely concentrated in the hands of upper class, cis-het Hindu men. None of this information is new, or surprising, yet every time I have to contend with such micro-aggressions, I think of the many ways this chips at who I’ve built myself to be— and to what extent the idea of the self is important, or versatile, or fluid, or has the space to encompass contradictions.
Before I moved to the Capital, I told myself I’ll live next to a park or a forest and go on walks. When I look out of my balcony, that sliver of space inlaid with marble I crouch on, I see no women walking about.
Stories of the Partition were mostly narrated by the men of Partition— Manto, Ludhianvi, Faiz, Iqbal— the lens was turned to the world, to the violence on the streets, whereas the women— Khadija Mastoor, Rasheed Jahan, Ismat Chughtai— the women wrote of what they could see from their balconies, of how they passed the hours waiting on news about their men. Yesterday, when I chatted with an ex on a video call, I notice a lady in her sixties on the balcony across, watching me keenly. I’m not sure what she feels— disdain, envy, longing, judgment; perhaps a mix of all this.
Life has a terrible way of moving in cycles, in patterns, where if you spend enough time with yourself, you’re able to discern the edges of. Sometimes, you’re on the outside, observing this pattern and continuing on anyway, and sometimes you’re on the inside, unable to even register the tenor of what’s coming to pass. It’s so much easier to look at things in hindsight and understand how this moment spoke to a moment in your life a decade ago. Astrology holds reasons for this, as does psychology, but there’s no real way of knowing if there’s any deliverance from certain cards that you’re dealt. A friend tells me about how somebody at the Press Club who claims to be a player, and that when he saw us have a drink together, he insinuated it was a date. He tagged it as an ‘incel’ comment. Somebody asks a friend at a party if I’m on Ozempic because why do I look like this? I go to an afterparty and I notice I’ve started dressing androgynously, I wear glasses now, I believe the lie that if I hide my sexuality or sensuality, I will be taken more seriously in the circles I navigate with a faux confidence and a sense of simmering detachment. The publishing queers adopt me and tell me I have too much of a personality to not be queer, and I’m glad once again, that in this phase of my character arc, I have been accepted.
A close journalist friend of mine says that people who aren’t nepo babies or are estranged from their families, or didn’t grow up with a lot that most people in the circles I move in take for granted, have a sense of fire and hunger that can’t be competed with. No amount of pedigree and access can account for the sheer and white-knuckled will to survive. No south Delhi school education or Gymkhana membership can account for persisting in a country with a last name that’s akin to a slur. I’ve seen that firsthand— the privilege acting as a caustic potion that slowly poisons you from within, when you’re so far removed from reality, your biggest concern during the pandemic being not being able to go on International holidays, when the national holiday declared for Ram Mandir Inauguration affects the stock market and consequently, your fiscal capabilities, and perhaps, this is stating the obvious, but the real dissonance comes from the roles which are ascribed to us, the roles we take on. Who I am in a living room in Conoor with the legacy, and the baggage, of a debut novel to be released versus who I am when I lie on the couch of my best friend in Saligao. Or, when I bury my neck in the neck of a partner I shared a home with for four years versus the neck of a lover I’ve known for a month versus somebody else’s husband. What I choose to talk about when I sit at a beach shack in an erstwhile secluded beach turned hipster haven in north Goa with my coterie of friends, and what kind of an intellect or conversation I lead with at dinner parties in the Capital. I do feel that a writer of any vintage, over the course of their lifetime, will inhabit many such opposing and complementary worlds, and sometimes the sheer privilege of being able to live across multiple cities, and the attendant displacement that comes with moving between places, circles and people with an ease that’s both deceptive and mercurial, leaves me breathless.
Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant talks about a sense of ‘cruel optimism,’ wherein a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. As the social-democratic promise of the postwar period has retracted, people have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives “add up to something.” Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory—with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary—is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. This is evident as it plays out as the news from Palestine populates my social media, amidst saffron flags and misleading headlines across BBC, CNN and such.
Shifting to Delhi, away from the bubble of Goa, has come with a sense of possibility and novelty, a certain Beckett-isian charm that can’t be denied. Every writer fashions themselves to be of a vintage— with endless time and solitude to squander, a room to call your own, the freedom and space to distill the world and make that a sort of interrogation into the essential pain of the self. Damon Galgut says “what happens in the nation, happens in the family” and nowhere is this more true than today’s India. The French girls I no longer live with have adapted to the fissures in our society— the damsel in distress routine, the emotional blackmail, reducing ourselves to feminine wiles to get our way like we’ve regressed to the 50s. The sheer irony in what I do, the books I write, the brand of feminism I subscribe to and perpetuate, the way my tone changes when I talk to the Didi at home, or to the artist I meet at a Chattarpur gallery, or to the attractive lawyer I briefly co-habit with or the girl with the coloured hair who perceives herself as slightly odd.
I wrote the novel while the world was on fire, bolstered by a loving partner, the support of friends who never asked for too much, who implicitly understood when I needed to be left alone, and when I needed to be held, the tree outside my window that survived three monsoons, the morning call of the birds in my garden— luxuries that have altered my DNA— created somebody who isn’t threatened by the idea of slowing down or merely existing, who doesn’t need people’s constant counterpoint to finesse my own thoughts, who can write with the abandon of someone content in the knowledge that their work will never be read.
Being a writer who’s perpetually online, I’m subjected to the rhythms of pop culture that make less and less sense to me with each passing day, like a “brat summer” while Bangladeshis storm the parliament, videos of beheaded babies in refugee camps populate my feed and most people my age scramble to make rent in the cost of living crisis or continue living with their parents. I’ve taken to taking prolonged naps because the usual rituals that sustained me and my mental health make little sense in an increasingly absurd and dystopian world. Writing has rarely ever been altruistic pursuit, and in the face of everything, feels wildly self-important, so continuing in that vein, I want to talk about the time between March 2023 to now, shifting back to the Capital, the book deal, and how it changed everything, while changing nothing at all.
The life of a writer is usually beset with obstacles; my internal weather never seems to align with the temperature outside, I write because I feel at odds with the world, and it’s one of the few ways to try and make sense of the crushing weight and futility of existence that’s only often alleviated by spending time with friends on their couches, swims in the ocean, walks in a forest or gazing at a sunlit mountain top. When I first shifted to Delhi, I had grandiose plans of finishing the first draft of my next novel by the time this one released, I was amidst editing an anthology on climate fiction, I was perpetually cold sequestered in a friend’s apartment, but it felt like some kind of a purification, a purge of some sort, a punishment in some other ways, or that the fact that my internal emotional landscape that always feels so unsure and insecure, could be justified in the cold harshness of Delhi— not a peek of the sun, no smiling face, just the loudness of everyone’s loneliness staring you in the face, colouring every interaction. I’m not even sure what I want anymore— perhaps, I never was. My therapist told me to remember the feeling the mountains evoke in me, what I felt when I saw the light turning, my anxiety’s always lower in the cold, but a pervasive sense of being removed from the world persists. Writing remains an attempt to bridge this gap.
The violent oscillation between a delusional belief in my talent interspersed with colossal moments of being convinced that I can’t write persists. Enough writers I’ve read growing up or admired have insisted that writing can’t be taught, and enough readers have insisted that I possess ‘the voice’ which is more of a prerequisite than any formal education. I didn’t study English literature, nor do I have an MFA, I formally studied film because my relationship to reading and writing felt too sacred to be violated by any pedagogic instruction, my readings on craft involve reading far and wide since the age of twelve, and writing almost everyday. Yet, what keeps me going everyday is that I’m nowhere close to mastering the craft or saying anything of worth that can have a life of its own, and a book deal doesn’t change that.
I walked into a bookstore in a posh market recently, and the staff members asked my friend and I if we’d like to chat with an author who writes books on business who’s just walked in. He makes polite conversation with the staff about how he loves the layout of this particular bookstore, how there’s space to have a coffee, read a book. I know he’s itching to ask how many copies he’s sold, how his work is being received. Another moment at a bookstore where an ageing gentleman with a back brace inquires about how many copies he’s sold so far. Nobody prepares you for how alienating getting a book deal actually is. There’s the burden of perceived success— you’re looked at with a sense of reverence that feels unfounded, you can’t tell if people want to cosy up to you on account of this purported social capital, or if there’s more to you than the sudden weight of presenting as an articulate, well-read, worldly somebody with a clever opinion ready at every occasion.
There are many factors that contribute to getting agented or having a book deal; a strange combination of luck, timing, talent and hard work— the last one being the only thing that’s in my control. There’s also a marked difference I notice between the fiction writers in this city, and fiction writers elsewhere. The ones here have a deeper understanding of the mechanics of the industry, of the politics of writing, they have clear goals— both financial and otherwise— their love of literature isn’t lessened by these factors, but their relationship to the work is affected and changed by this knowledge. The writers I know who are still writing in some corner of the country or the world, and I’ll get castigated for saying this, have a more intuitive, if less “polished” relationship to the work. The thing with being in a city like Delhi is that everyone has an opinion; on how you should be writing, what you should be writing about, what a writer’s schedule or routine should look like, the smirk of knowing when another writer reads an interview answer about how monotony and nothingness is how I arrive at anything worthwhile to say, the mere fact that I have to give interviews now; while I was accustomed to the private tensions, no part of me could’ve calculated the public pressures of this reality.
— to be continued.