Inspiration

The joys of writing, I sometimes think, can be distilled into two utterly sublime and transient moments. There’s that moment you first recognize that you have come upon something. You don’t know it’s complete shape or all that it will be yet, but there’s that glimpse of recognition and that soaring joy of possibility. This could be that thing: your next essay or novel or story or paragraph, and you will walk all the way to edge of the cliff, and off, in its wake. You might fall or fly, and in that moment, it hardly matters which. The other, smaller and deeper, is that other moment of recognition when something of promise or resonance, of beauty even, has appeared on the page. When you can lean back in your chair for those briefest of moments, and look upon the words on a screen the way you would the face of a sleeping child. And before, between and after those moments come the hours or months of striving, of uncertainty and self-doubt, all of those times when you ask yourself why you write, or even this: why did you think you could write? I’ve accepted, over the years, that this does not compute by logic or math. But if there’s pattern recognition in the mix—you can see that these are the highs that propel addicts of every stripe.

What seems unfair, though, is this: despite all of that striving, you cannot will those moments into being. They happen. When I was deep into writing The Alchemy of Secrets, a dear friend sent me this video. It resonated at the time— I could relate to the idea of being given a gift of vision, of story. All those moments of soaring promise happened outside of my control— all I had to do was allow my heart to lift with them, and write them into being. Or perhaps I only remember it that way in hindsight, when faced with the terrifying prospect of writing a new novel, of willing one into existence from nothing. I had naively assumed that writing the second would be easier— I have more familiarity with the mechanics and the inside workings of novels than when I began with the first, after all.

But the world, and I, have changed. The world burns around us and I have turned into a diffident, sorrow-avoiding consumer who leaves the room when news, or fiction, turns toward the disturbing. It feels as if something has shifted, perhaps forever. I set out to write a happy novel, and it is very different from my first. The old questions are still there, but new ones appear daily. When I wrote before, it was in secret—without expectations, my own or anyone else’s. I worry less now about finishing, and more about what will result when I am done. And all I have to lean upon is that innate sense of—for want of a better word— superstition, or faith, perhaps. Like this moment we came upon this trio of a sculptor’s muses, at the outdoor Umlauff sculpture museum in Austin. They reminded me of the things I had believed strongly in a more secure world, and when I was deep into my first novel. That all creative works are somehow a gift, perhaps of some benign genius that exists outside us. Or perhaps, as I am more inclined to think, they are the churnings of a separate subconscious. That the true reward of writing, and the reason we engage in this work, is for those moments of joy when that gift of inspiration arrives or is rendered, finally, into being. Whatever else happens or fails to happen, those joys are ours to keep.

So I give these trio of muses to you, gentle reader, with that sense of liberation that I felt when I first came upon them. And whatever it is that occupies your hours and days of striving—may your muses stay close, and visit often.

Hope

I feel like I do when I begin an email to a much loved friend, when I’ve been the one to drop off from a long-running conversation— it has been a while, hasn’t it?

I will not use the excuse of a tumultuous year, or the roller-coaster ride of emotions that accompanied it— if you follow me on social media or have taken a stroll around the website, you already know that The Alchemy of Secrets was published last year, and to some attention. The truth is a bit more complicated than that, as well. It has been a while since I have been able to write. For much of the year, it has felt as if doom was just around the corner. Perhaps I was never as exposed to the suffering of the world as I was last year, or perhaps more accurately, I never paid as much attention. There were also deeply personal things I’d never considered before: the distance between continents when there are no flights, for instance. Mortality, my own or those of the people I loved, for another. It all added up to an absence of something vital. A sense of being unmoored; a distance from the person I used to be. It was as if there had always been a place of peace, of joy, that I could retreat to deep inside, and suddenly I had lost my directions to it.

During this year of being on-edge and just a bit off-balance, most of my creative energy was spent promoting my book. It was a task I embraced with the fervor of all new mothers everywhere, and occasionally even enjoyed. (The cringing and self-doubt shall remain firmly off-page.) But amidst all of that, hearing from people who read my book was a constant and repeated joy. It often felt like the only reliable one. In my everyday day life, everything had contracted and was constantly changing. In the surreal world I inhabited as a first-time author, I interacted with people I’d never met and sometimes felt as if I had known forever. Each was a gift. especially in that pandemic-cloistered space where I had become hyper-attuned to everything.

A few months ago, I received a distinctly odd message on Facebook Messenger. There was a woman in South Africa, writing to ask why no bookstores around her carried my book. There was a litany of bookstores that she contacted in India, who had refused to mail it to her. She sounded annoyed. Only India rights to the novel had sold, so I was unsurprised. I was also somewhat suspicious that this was some scam— really, would someone contact me if they hadn’t even read the book? I debated replying, and kept putting it off. A few weeks later, I received a similar email via the website and this time I wrote back. In our subsequent correspondence I discovered that she had heard about the book from an online book club, and wanted to read it not only because the story seemed intriguing, but because her ancestors were from India and she was trying to understand where she came from and what might have been. I offered to mail her a book from my dwindling stash, but procrastinated on my post-office run. A few weeks later, I woke up thinking of the books (hers and a few others) that I still hadn’t mailed out. I literally had them gathered up in the crook of my arm when I checked my email for the first time that morning. Nestled in the usual spam was an email from my South African friend. “Thank you, your book arrived,” was how it began, but there was more. Amidst a freak storm breaking around her as she wrote the email, she said, she saw a bird dive for cover. It was black, and blue, and the underside of its wings was red. It reminded her of my book’s cover, and she signed off saying she hoped it was a sign, and one that she took to mean that soaring success would ensue for the book.

We eventually sorted all out. Someone else had mailed her the book. I sent her a signed one to keep, as well. And I waited to hear what she would think when she finally read this book she had so determinedly pursued. Does anything ever live up to such expectation? Happily, by the five star reviews she left literally everywhere I looked, this was one of those instances.

It’s one of many stories I’ve been fortunate to be part of, and one I picked to tell because its improbability, in part, demanded its telling, but also because it’s filled with such generosity of spirit. (She also invited me to stay at her home if there was ever a South Africa book tour!) And also because for many days and weeks after, the whole episode seemed somehow a reassurance that everything (and not just the book) would turn out alright in the end.

I write this now in a time that seems more hopeful. The news is better, and I no longer feel impelled to follow it with the anxiety I did before. There are vaccines, and an end is in sight. We’ve made a transition from chaos and impending authoritarianism to decency and democracy here, even if that’s not true everywhere in the world, yet. I still cling to my escapist fiction, and leave the room when shows on Netflix turn to anything that resembles raw or real emotion. But new characters dance into vision each day, closer and with increasing solidity. And everyday I get closer to the place I used to retreat to, and write from. And with this blog post, I might have broken that dry and winter-long spell, after all. Hope is everything.

Joy

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There was this news item buried in the coverage of all the suffering caused by the government shutdown, of elephant seals taking over a beach left vacant because of it. It felt like a private joy when I saw it, a tiny measure of rightness with the world when so much was not. I ought to have let you all know, but the minute passed. As did this, when they did it again. This time, the seals would arrive during a particularly tumultuous period in my life.

The exhilarating part of the story is easy to tell: my debut novel, The Alchemy of Secrets, ten years in the making, found a home. My agent in India, Jayapriya Vasudevan, sold India rights for the novel to Deepthi Talwar at Tranquebar press, a literary imprint of Westland. It felt like coming out of the wilderness. Someone else, other than friends and family or my long-suffering agents in the US or India, loved my book and the characters I had grown to love. I say this without exaggeration: it was as if the world had shifted under my feet, and nothing would ever be the same again. As periods of exhilaration go, this was particularly long-lasting—I must have had a good twelve hours. It wasn’t the deal that evaporated after that, only the euphoria. (I jest, but only in part.)

It’s harder to explain the worries that followed, or the self-doubt that they were rooted in. I looked my deep and long-wished for joy in the face, and all I could think of was of all that could go wrong. I suspect most writers are neurotic, as I am— how else do we get the tiny details right; make sure the myriad little details line up in the tall tales we tell? Then, there are the overactive imaginations we possess, and the personal history—even for wildly successful writers, the path towards success is often built upon a scaffold of prior rejection upon rejection. Essentially, we fail and fail, until we don’t. Perhaps we fail better each time, or perhaps it is more capricious than that. Perhaps it all leads to a deep-rooted superstition that one must ignore joy, or pretend it doesn’t exist, lest it take flight like some wild butterfly approached too close.

The next part is even harder to tell. Perhaps because it is not my story, only one that I observed at close quarters. It has nothing to do with writing, and everything to do with life. We lost a friend recently. It was an unexpected death—he was still young and in good health, with years left to give and grow old in. If exhilarating joy is evanescent, I can tell you that sorrow of any kind is not. It is nothing if not faithful, a dogged companion you think you lose, only to find waiting at unexpected corners. When we first heard of his passing, his wife, a dear friend, told me over and over, disbelieving, “We were so happy.” As they were, and as we all are. And as we continue to be.

I began this blog with some half-conceived idea that it would be a happy place. And yet I find myself attempting to write about joy, and lingering instead on its absence. But perhaps what I am reaching for is perspective. There are the wild swings of emotion: the moments we remember from when we first fall in love, or when babies emerge naked and instantly adored from our wombs, or the loss of a beloved grandmother. There are events that change the ordinary course of our lives, for better or worse. But underneath it all is the steady hum of life lived daily and the quieter joys that pass, for the large part, unnoticed. A quiet meal at home with family or tea and a chat with friends, an unexpected and welcome text from a child away at college, a glimpse of bridge or elephant seal, but also the periods in between when nothing happens of import but everything does. Here’s to all of those moments, where joy hides in plain sight—undemanding, and ours for the taking. Perhaps those are the joys that truly matter, in the end.

A Time of One's Own

I head outside my little neighborhood, past sidewalks empty of all but the most enthusiastic dog-walkers braving fog and rain this morning, to a busy street that is filled with early morning commuters. I suspect we’re all regulars—a well-behaved and mostly polite bunch who seem to just want to get to work with a minimum of fuss. Traffic hums along like some well-oiled automaton.

I’ve driven this route for the better part of ten years—and have enjoyed it more than most would. The first gem that my morning commute tosses up is a quick glimpse of a bridge that you can just barely spy here. Today from my car window, it towers majestic and solid, red-gold over a river that is carpeted dense and white with fog. It is beautiful, and perhaps the first of my everyday joys. And it seems, as always, an unlikely benediction—a portent of calm for the day to come.

Like most commutes, mine runs through mile upon mile of commercial enterprise, redeemed, perhaps unlike others, by gracious and towering trees. Neighborhoods as well—there’s a quirky one just next door that prizes its right to have chickens. Another, further along, has modest older homes, some with swing sets and slides and fruit-laden trees in backyards, and pick-up trucks parked in front. There’s a strawberry stand that I always mean to stop at and haven’t yet. A pale yellow craftsman home that advertises a psychic, and each day I wonder, what if today, I turned in to give her a try?

Somewhere along them all is a chiropractor’s office like any other, except it has a large sign outside that changes at random intervals. At the peak of flu season last year the sign advertised adjustments instead of the “poisons” in a flu vaccine. On New Year’s Day it said: “Your body is a temple. Does yours feel like a night club?” The day after, predictably, came an advertisement for a 21 day purification program. I allow myself to imagine the chiropractor. The fiction of him comes easy— he is slight and tall, with tiny birdlike steps despite the length of his legs. He opens doors for little old ladies, even as he simmers with unexpressed rage inside. I laugh aloud at this image, and it seems we’re finally even for the flu vaccine jab. I’ve never seen him, and I hope that in reality the office is owned by a gregarious and plump woman ready with tea and laughs. Perhaps she only outsources her advertising.

I tuck this gift of a new character away in some mental back drawer. I’ve no doubt he’ll emerge with the deliciousness of all his unexplored rage intact in some future story, somewhere. But by now, I’ve driven past a couple of parks, a fire station, a high school whose library tempts me daily with its large and sometimes open windows, and am almost at work. My time for frivolity has ended. I set aside all flights of fancy, grateful regardless for the fortification they’ve provided. Because medicine, my first love, waits, and she is an exacting taskmistress.

New Year 2019

On a short family vacation last week, we drove on Highway 1 along the miles of breathtaking coastline between Monterey and San Simeon. It was on one of the many beaches along the way that I came upon a certain elephant seal. He lay on his massive belly in his own small curve of beach, a little way off from a larger collection of his compatriots who were clustered together. And as we watched, he snorted or snored (we disagreed a bit on which it was, or if it was a belch) and then he lifted his flipper in a wave, before settling back into sleep. It felt like a moment of un-looked-for joy, and I can’t really explain why it would feel that way. But it feels apt to share it with you, unknown reader, who perhaps happened upon this page in similar serendipity.

It’s a New Year, and a chance to start over. The resolutions I considered were similar to years past: exercise daily, write consistently every day to an egg timer, clean out my closet or take up meditation. They are all absolutely things I need to do. But I’ve learned a bit from the graveyard of resolutions of years past, and the one I have settled on is simply this: to be more like my friend the elephant seal. To be as comfortable in my skin as that, and perhaps to bring a moment of joy to the people who cross my path. It seems liberating and joyful already, in contrast to all that I have set myself up to do in the past. So here’s my gift to you for 2019— a wish that you will be the best and most comfortable version of yourself, and that as you count the steps or run the mile, clean out closets, or cook healthier meals, or do any and all the things that you really should, you find joy, for yourself and for those around you.

(You’ll notice that I am no marine biologist, and have no real knowledge of elephant seals. I assume my friend is male, but I really have no idea. I also know the picture does not do him justice—but you can read all about elephant seals, if you are so inclined, here, where they have a treasure trove of better pictures.)

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Welcome!

I came to writing relatively late in life, and at the most inopportune of times. I had just finished the gruelling years of residency and fellowship, and started my first real job. Of my two children, one was not quite two years old. I hadn't written anything creative for years. And yet there I was, attempting with the determination of the foolhardy, to write a novel. It was one that was propelled by an image that arrived out of nowhere and with increasing frequency: an old white sari clad woman with a child holding on to her little finger. I had no idea yet of the book it would become, or the years it would take to write.

Years passed. I got to know the little girl, Mira, her grandmother, the white sari clad Ajji, and all the people who filled their world. The novel grew, and it changed. What began almost as an ode to my childhood home, Bangalore, became progressively darker. Long held disquiets made their way into the novel. There was corruption, political expediency, inequality of many types, betrayal and treachery. There were surprises; there was redemption. And finally, there it was, the book I called The Alchemy of Secrets.

Along the way, I found strangers who became dear friends. There were people, places and experiences that I encountered only because I wrote. There were workshops and books on craft. There was the constant self-doubt that is so common to anyone who writes, and mine felt more deserved than most. There was rejection, and heartbreak. There was, and is, joy.

For years I wrote in secret. Even when it was no longer a secret, I hesitated to use that word: Writer. But here we are, at this space. It's an online home for my writing self, quite separate from the world I inhabit each day. I hope that you stay awhile, and that you find something new, possibly interesting or amusing, each time you visit.

Welcome.

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