Amit Chaudhuri - Real Time - Stories and a Reminiscence

Once inside the car, he said to his wife, “I don’t know about you, but I’m quite ravenous.”

I FELT THE URGEto write this after I began to read Shobha De’s memoirs. If she can write her memoir, I thought, so can I. For who would have thought, Shobha De least of all, that one day she would write her life story for other people to read? She had been an ordinary, if beautiful, girl who got recruited (as she says) from a middle-class home into modelling, never particularly interested in studies (I was the same at her age), and then, through accident and ambition, got married into one of Bombay’s richest families, started her own magazine and began writing her own gossip column, got divorced, reinvented herself as a writer of middles for Bombay newspapers, married again, became India’s first successful pulp novelist, and now has written her memoirs. Through what a strange chain of events people arrive at the world of writing — and Shobha De’s tranformation has been one of the most unexpected in my lifetime. It shows me the endless possibilities of the society we have lived in. And I ask myself the question: if she can be a writer, and inscribe her thoughts and impressions in language, why not I?

There’s the question, of course, of who would want to read my memoirs, or whatever it is I’m setting out to write — because I’m not altogether sure what it is. But (although I’ve never seen myself as a writer before) these are questions, I’m certain, that preoccupy (inasmuch as I can enter the mind of a writer) all who write (it’s an area I know little about). And it consoles me to think that at one time every writer must have done what I’m doing now, starting out and not knowing where it was leading to. It’s not a feeling you can communicate to someone who’s never tried it. Some people, I’m sure, end up taking this route by intention and dedication, after years of preparation — my daughter has a friend who, at thirteen, is already writing lovely poems that have been published in Femina and her school magazine; I’m sure she’ll be a fine writer one day, and she looks set for that course. Others, like myself, and probably Shobha De, arrive at that route by chance (although Shobha De very differently from me), and it’s from her that I take a kind of courage, that she should have ended up a writer, although it makes me smile even as I say it.

Yet I’m not quite sure of my English, though it’s the only language I have. My knowledge of the Indian languages is passing; I can speak a smattering of a few, but can’t read or write any one of them with authority. I was born in Patna, of a Gujarati mother and a father who is a deracinated Andhra Brahmin; my link to any Indian language became, thus, tenuous. I’m not sure who’d be interested in any of this, though; why should anyone want to know why I write in English, or who my parents were, or how they came to be my parents? But I take heart from small things, besides the uncontrollable urge to get on with the job at hand, an urge that I don’t quite understand; “small things” like the fact that a new writer comes into being almost every day. This is terrifying, but it also gives me (and, I’m sure, many others like me) the impetus to take the first step. I don’t necessarily admire all the writers around me, but sometimes it is good to have their presences about (many of them will not be heard of again) as I start out on this venture.

* * *

MY HUSBAND CAME INa little earlier from the office yesterday than he usually does, energetic but starved, and he caught me sitting alone, looking out at the sea. “What are you doing?” he asked quizzically; and I started. I think I looked guilty. I knew we had a party to go to in the evening. How could I tell him that I was trying to do something I became ashamed of the moment he entered, that I was trying to frame a sentence?

* * *

I WENT TOa Christian school, and learnt to speak the words of the Lord’s Prayer before I knew what they were. This was in the hot hall of my convent in Patna, with a few hundred other girls, only a few of whose names I remember. I mumbled the words without knowing what they were, and never have found out; but I spoke them reverentially and grew up believing in God. Whenever I thought of a Supreme Deity, which was not often but not altogether infrequently, either, it was God I thought of, rather than “parameshwar” or “ishwar.” But I have never been inside a church, except as a tourist in Goa.

My father’s beliefs were contradictory; that is, his beliefs about religion. His beliefs were to do with human beings, the future of the country, and, most important, the upbringing of children. Children must be given love and pride of place, but career must be given priority, too, for the opportunities it will provide, eventually, one’s children. God he hardly mentioned at all, except during the crises in his career, when he would mention him philosophically rather than religiously, saying, for instance, “Well, no one can change what God has already determined.” When I write these words about him, I feel I’m not only describing my father but a general figure, someone whom many other people will recognise in their father. Mothers and fathers belong half to fiction, anyway; it’s not as if you’re only their biological offspring; they, too, have reinvented themselves as parents to give you, while you live, the fiction of themselves.

* * *

WHOM DOES ONEwrite for? At least one of the answers will have to be—“David Davidar.” When I do put my thoughts in order, when I do finally set out on this project, it’s him I shall be thinking of. Because he gives me, and others like me, a valid reason. It gives us hope that someone will rescue our manuscripts, our thoughts put down and carefully typed on paper, from oblivion and eternity. Because I am sure that he doesn’t — I don’t know him, but I have composed him, as an individual with motives and conceptions and almost no prejudices, willy-nilly, piecemeal from what I’ve read from twenty or thirty articles about writing and publishing over the last eight or nine years — I’m sure he doesn’t consign anything to the dustbin until he’s given it a proper chance. And Lord knows, he must have quite a few manuscripts upon his table. Not all of them are from famous people. When he came into our lives about ten or eleven years ago (I can’t remember exactly when), it was as if he wasn’t quite real — we might have dreamed him up. It was as if he’d come from nowhere. But apparently he actually comes from the South; or at least he looks like a South Indian (I’ve seen him on television). One day — not too far from now, I hope — my manuscript will be waiting at his table.

* * *

WHERE TO BEGIN?As I’ve said to you, the only language I have is English. I remember learning longhand in kindergarten, rows of letters, first a series of a’s, then b’s, and so on.

* * *

I’M UNCOMFORTABLEbeginning at the beginning. It’s not because I’m clever, but because it’s a difficult thing, writing. And I haven’t had any past experience. I used to write poems, of course, when I was quite young; they were passionate and formless but somehow arranged themselves into short and long lines and stanzas without my having to do much about it. Later, they stopped altogether. I suppose it was because I became not unattractive and, after an awkward puberty, when I wasn’t sure of myself, acquired a circle of friends and a “social life.” You will wonder at the inverted commas, but, in the seventies, so much of what we did was in inverted commas; “sex,” “love,” “going all the way”; we all talked about it, but half of it was conversation and fantasy, we didn’t go “all the way.”