Unborn Writers Society

When Kushwant Singh passed away, my Friend and I had a long , transatlantic chat that flashed back to long forgotten days...... How we adored that toxic "lecher" in the light bulb who gleefully slaughterd Holy Cows with malice towards one and all ! How we revered his irreverent earthy humour and acerbic wit !
And, how when we wanted tuition in composing incisive, unsentimental prose that still packed an emotional punch, we always turned to his Train To Pakistan.


Why we needed such tuition will be the grist milled in this post .


We go way, way back, Friend and I. To antediluvian , alphabet learning days. We were together when we discovered , in organic progression, Mother Goose, Enid Blyton , Louisa May Alcott, Georgette Heyer, Erica Jong , Sylvia Plath , Anita Desai, ......alright, we did read male storytellers too ; them and their braggartly posturing with Rye fields and Motorcycle maintainance and pig Farms and carpetbags and fornicating stepfathers . Ok stuff, but nothing to "Discover" in them. But Writing flowing out of feminine psyches were Discoveries for us. Friend and I would burst at the seams with inspiration and inflamed zeal as we returned the overdue library books : 'Thats how we think too ! If they can author , why cant we ? "


It was a pathbreaking Discovery for girls brought up in a certain milieu of a certain epoch, with certain indoctrinations , to open eyes to possibilities beyond conditioned certainties. Thats how we, Friend and I , conceived our shared Grand Illusion , that we too could be WRITERS ! As in "English language novelists."


Before the vagaries of our young life could remedy this mental twitch, Friend and I put a resolute pencil to paper of superannuated diaries ,jointly and severally, and started producing masterpieces titled " Mystery of the Burnt Cottage Cheese" , "Rise and Fall of the Third Leech" and " Under the Sandalwood Tree" ......


While our infantile output had been humoured by our adult minders, our later, post -adolescent exertions were frowned upon as waste of time and energy, best discouraged . Or better diverted towards more useful attainments like playing stringed instruments , cooking the perfect poricchakoottu or mastering the Qwerty keys. We were , at least I was, ordered to stop spinning yarns, in short order .


But Friend and I, faithful to our ancient oath, went underground, so to speak, to continue working on our wicked designs . There was tremulous excitement in defiance and secrecy. We worked hard . No one could accuse us of prefunctory effort.


The first taste of victory came when Friend got a small item ( called a "Middle" in newspaper parlance ) published in the market-leading newspaper . She was, as I was, just 19 ! And did it make a splash in our ghetto !
After congratulating her, polishing off her laddoo treats and heartily wishing her greater successes, my parents lost no time dinning some solid parental advise into me, once out of her earshot : I was not to get star-struck by such flashes in the pan . or make reckless choices in life at the instigation of my spoilt Friend. And I had better focus my attention on getting a decent Degree which would help me land either a decent husband or a halfway decent government job. Which I finally never got. I mean the degree and the job.( But acquired a more than decent husband, willynilly, in due time ).


However that may be, I refused to unfriend the "misguiding"Friend, whose maiden Middle was quickly followed by a one page story in a Woman's magazine , a home-improvement article in the local eveninger and two Letters to the Editor. Five in all. Handsome harvest ! It gave us the strength to assume she was now , truly and wholly, a Writer ! And , as is the wont of selfrespecting Writers, she gave up chasing after minor trophies and started planning for The Grand Novel , a Labour of Love. A Magnum Opus at the conception stage itself. Ably and tirelessly assisted by her bosom buddy , me, who was to be named Co-Author.


We drafted an outline of epic proportions to pack in humour, romance, social message, crime, misunderstandings , triumph of Spirit, mystery , human interest and feel good factors, a bit of period politics ...... . We gorged ourselves on thesaurus pages for vocabulary, Regency Romances for the art, Kushwant Singh and Erma Bombeck for the craft, The Mahabharatha for the stuffing. She bought an expensive ReadersDigest tome titled " How to Speak Better and Write Better " and we started speaking better . As for the Writing , its difficult to say if jotted down telegraphic notes can, in any way, become better or worse.


We had a whale of time choosing a Title. It had to be an attention grabber in addition to being charged with "layers of meaning" .
And names for the characters. We just couldnt see our precious protagonist ( definitely female ) being called by any of the common two-syllabic-cutie names so popular in movies at that time. We listed remembered experiences that we would use to flesh out her personality . Autobiographic material made best raw material for believable stories .
We made a covenant that our primary male character shall not be tall, dark, handsome and byronic .......


Ideas and lists and dialogue drafts and references.......
The 100 page note book , crammed with these , the seeds of our magnificent creation, was stored in her wardrobe, under her box of bobbypins, where no censorious hand of any prying parent could reach it.
And there it sat gestating, cuddled and fattened by us . With feverish frequency at first ; by and by, at progressively ....lengthening ........intervals...........


It is still in gestation . With elephantine endurance. Now she is, as I am, on the wrong side of 30 . You do know , numbers 31 to 99 are on the wrong side of 30 , but lets not dwell on unimportant vitae now. Whats of relevance to this post is that Friend is now a Foreign Passport holding homemaker of a confused diasporic family , dividing her valuable me-time between an Outreach programme and a No Profit Foundation saving endangered heritage grains. So passionate about the latter is she that you'd think horsetail millets held the key to rescuing a world teetering on the brink of selfdestruction. With all her passion so spent, where's the time to nurture our first unborn ? But she herself is quite positive that One day, Some day, Any day now, The Book will give birth to itself as a scintillating exposition of technical and linguistic excellence , unputdownable for plot and unforgettable for execution . I wait .


In the meantime, I am trying to grapple with the amazing new language she now expresses herself in , one which can offer the whole Jean Christophe experience in 140 characters.


While the ingredients of her proposed literary feast hibernate in some remote cold-storage , her partner in crime has come into some wisdom of her own. Constantly encouraged / badgered by her, I did despatch my little independent creations to newspapers and magazines accompanied by " return envelope and postage stamps , for use if needed" . They were always needed and used.
It was only after achieving a respectable collection of elegantly worded rejection slips from an assortment of addresses that I finally saw what my dear mother had always tried to point out to me. That I could have used Time better. My poricchakoottu sucks.

 

Dear Rihana
thank you so much.
Those days were real magic , werent they ! How easily we made friiends and how readily we accepted any idiosyncracy among us !
My friend was the more writerly type, she was obsessed with becoming a writer . It used to rub off on me.
How well you put it ! As idealistic girls turn into accomodating women , abandoning girlish dreams, its always a nice to think that there will be other little girls, enjoying similar childhood adventures .........

 

Oh Srama,
you sweet creature ! Are you for real ? I just love the fact that you collect your kids handiwork as loving mementos ! They will be much more precious when your kids are no longer kids.....
its not that our parents did not know how to appreciate or encourage the interests of their children. Just that, in those days, life meant something totally different to them, they were more concerned with " settling " the daughters in time honoured, tradition satisfying ways. Writing stories certainly did not figure high in the list of what young women needed to do. Writing, at the most, was only a side amusement fir housewives!
Lol ! Thanks for the advance booking on our book. Once we succeed in locating that notebook, we will know if our great novel is indeed what we thought it to be, or some tripe , like the screen play of a C grade movie ! We are now old enough to know !

thank you very much for your gracious words, Srama. Very happy that you enjoyed reading.