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 ONE write 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 UNCOMFORTABLE beginning 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.”
* * *
I THINK THE EARLY YEARS in Patna, though my memories of them are few, and often random and disconnected, must be the reason why I’ve never felt I belong here — to Bombay — although this is where I grew up. Yet I never think of myself as a person who “comes from Bombay”; it’s the place I’ve lived in much of my life. Where do I come from, then? I don’t have to go to Gujarat to visit my Gujarati relatives; many of them live here, on Peddar Road. My nani, my mother’s mother, died in a third-floor flat in a building at the turning of Peddar Road and Gamadia Road.
* * *
YOU ASK ME if I feel more South Indian or Gujarati — I don’t know. I know a few Telegu words, but my father didn’t speak very much in Telegu at home. The language my parents spoke to each other was English. I grew up in a fifth-floor apartment on Nepean Sea Road, very near where the small flyover was built in the seventies. How many walks my friends, especially Kamini, who lived in the same building, and I took across that flyover!
Kamini and I, too, spoke to each other in English, although her parents were from the Andhra as well; but it never occurred to us to experiment with Telegu in our conversation. I don’t think we even had a clear idea that we were South Indians, I at least in part; the solidarity we felt had to do with the fact that we went to the same school. The English we spoke, I now realize, was garnished with Hindi words for effect; it all sounded very clever-clever: “Didn’t do too well in my chemistry paper. Chalta hai, yaar!” This was our Esperanto, and we never thought to think it anything but English; it wouldn’t have done to speak in any other kind of English. The girls who spoke in “perfect” English were slightly ridiculous and were supposed to be “goody-goody.”
That’s exactly the Esperanto that Shobha De (then Rajadhyaksha) and her colleagues began to write in Stardust in the seventies. There was something slightly impolite about that language, wasn’t there? — all right for schoolgirls to speak in, but to write in…?
* * *
ALTHOUGH SO MANY PEOPLE write these days (so many, it’s difficult to imagine), you feel the world you know, the India you know, is still to be written about. Is this merely solipsistic? Shobha (I hope she won’t mind me using her first name) has scratched the tip of the iceberg, though; I now feel that her life is also in some way mine — I don’t mean the celebrity; though even celebrity emerges from that book, Selective Memory (what an apposite, an inevitable name!), as a kind of character, a desirable freak that some people got to know in Bombay at that time, rather than as destiny. Even the portfolio of photographs, the author now with Amitabh Bachchan, or Indira Gandhi, or Nari Hira, looks slightly doctored, as if all the photos of Shobha De had been taken on the same day, for she is the same — perpetually young, her carved face immutable — in all of them, while the others — Nari Hira, Amitabh Bachchan — are fraught with contingency, they look like trespassers. I’ve seen the tricks that are possible these days; that’s why John F. Kennedy looks like an intruder, alone and slightly nervous, when he’s made to shake hands in Forrest Gump with Tom Hanks without being certain he’s in the movie.
But that’s not what I mean when I say that Shobha De’s life is in some way mine. It’s not the celebrity; it’s the detritus that we all know but no one speaks of, the banal, briefly glittering sequence of events, where the heart beats underneath. That is what I’m concerned with; because that is when I feel myself in the silence, on the edge of the words, not yet a writer (just as she is not yet a writer) but listening to what we in the upper middle class in Bombay frivolously call “life.” Because, however much we insist, we will never be quite writers; literature is not where we start from. All those years, going to the matinee, borrowing books from the British Council, thinking you might be acquiring a boyfriend — literature was not what proscribed or described those episodes. Of course, we read books (I think Shobha did as well), and I even studied English literature; but that was studying other people’s lives, authors and characters. Where our hearts beat, that was secret, or disappointing, or satisfying, or trivial, too trivial for it to become words or a story. Really, our lives were glamorous and happy but too trivial. And it is there that I must begin, that is why all of us writers who have still not written a word are impatient to disturb the silence.