Someday My Writing Will Be Good

I write because it calms me. I write to get my thoughts in order. I write so that I can look back on my past. I write to practice my communication. But when I read what I have written, even a few days later, I cringe at the immaturity of my thoughts and writing. I wonder how I could be so silly. I worry that my writing is a reflection of my shallowness, and depth is what I aspire to.

Words have always been my friends. While I was studying, I loved writing essays and stories as part of my curriculum. My teachers thought I was good. It gave me a quiet confidence in the ability to use the written word to express my feelings, beliefs and arguments. I even made money thanks to this love for writing. It wasn’t big money, but enough to support my dreams for an ambitious future.

Yet, today I feel inadequate. I mock my ability to express myself through writing. I feel insecure about having forgotten how to. The fear of sounding stupid has gripped me for close to four years now. It takes gargantuan effort to fire up the laptop, and even after it’s on, I find something else to do rather than write.

In school grammar, reading and writing as a way to answer specific questions was taught to me. I loved poetry, but I failed to understand most of it. Growing up, I dabbled in music, art and sports but reading was my one constant hobby. Enid Blyton was the voice in my head. Wordsworth was the rhythm in my heart. Agatha Christie was my guide to the human psyche and I was in awe of Fredrick Forsyth’s mind.

Shakespeare was a familiar name, yet I never had access to him. My school libraries never gave much thought to educating our minds with the classics. A standard diet of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew was what they thought we needed.

I was fortunate to have a father who could rarely be found without a book in his hand. My grandmother once told me that he would ask her to save the newspaper pieces that the groceries came wrapped in. He’d come back from school and smooth out each crumpled piece, devouring the printed wisdom or bit of news. He was poor, and couldn’t buy books, so he would read anything he could lay his hands on.

Baba once took me to the public library in Pen, a sleepy town in Konkan where he was tasked to build a factory. He issued the Wizard of Oz for me and said, “I think you’ll like this one.” I loved it! It took my eight year old self many days to finish the story, but once I was done, I couldn’t stop talking about it. It had blown my mind open. (In that same town, I had once spotted a local woman smoking the local brand of rolled up tobacco. When I recounted this to Baba with a shocked and disapproving expression, he calmly said, “women smoke all the time.”)

A few years later, we moved to Mumbai and Baba finally had a job where he didn’t have to travel all week. When my summer vacation came around, he walked me to the community library in our neighbourhood and handed me a faded pink membership card. He promised to give me the monthly fee of Rs. 30 as long as I promised to keep returning the books on time. And of the three books I was allowed to borrow, one had to be for my little sister. I was probably the only teenager who was walking in and out of that library every couple of days, a smile plastered on my face.

So, reading was a legacy passed on from my father. Writing, not so much. I once tried to write a crime fiction short story for a competition in the Reader’s Digest. I had only jotted down a loose plotline and a couple of introductory pages. When I asked my father what he thought of my writing, he smiled his deep dimpled smile and said it needed more work. I gave up, thinking I could never be as good as Christie anyway.

As the decades flew by, I read so many more books. I wanted to have a well-paying job so that I could buy books, and an inexplicable amount of clothing from Mango. I never got around to owing a shred from the high fashion store, but books, I bought some every month. The more I read, the more inadequate I felt – here were prize winning authors writing legendary fiction and non-fiction, what gave me the idea that I could ever be even close?

But the burning desire to write and be good at it has persisted. My blog was a small flight born out of boredom and surplus time. The subjects interested me, and still do, but I never deemed my ramblings to be of much value. Over the past two years I have signed up for writing courses online. I thought learning the craft, having someone break down the method will boost my abilities. I now have my doubts about that line of thinking.

On some days I read poignant writing that moves me to tears. It is usually about people, relationships, failures and triumphs. I think more than I speak, or write. It makes me believe that when I do share my thoughts someday, they will be just as refined as some of these authors’ are. Until then, I’m practicing every day. And perhaps because of that I may be getting better bit by bit. I hope I am.

The Evening Ritual

The setting sun casts a golden glow, turning the child’s brown hair a glimmering copper. Shadows on the faintly yellow walls of the balcony have a life of their own. The view from their balcony on the eleventh floor is what postcards are made of, that is if people still make postcards.

The mother strains a little to hear the chirping of birds as they return to their nests. The languid calm of the boats floating on the gentle waves of the backwaters signal the close of a hot, humid day. The channel splits into two, one arm snakes away ahead of them and disappears from view behind a thick cover of mangroves while the other flows along their right, and curves gently, far away right under a metal bridge.

They hear the train a few seconds before they see it. Both turn their eyes to the bridge in the distance, and wait to catch a glimpse of a speeding train – they know not which end of the bridge the train will spring from. A gentle breeze cools the sweat on their skin, and makes it easy to focus on the beauty of the scene that lays before them. Swaying coconut trees, birds diving into the water to catch their morsels, a fiery pink-orange sky and the silhouettes of boatmen in their crescent-shaped, traditional boats. The faint sound of a prayer call from a mosque across the island adds another layer of charm - a touch of human gratitude. The scene is picturesque and soulful.

And then they see it. Loud clattering accompanies the arrival of the train on the metal bridge. The trusses vibrate, adding to the din the wheels make as the train speeds towards its destination. The boy and his mother hear the bellowing horn, and then the fast paced rhythm of a train on the tracks – chachuk – chachuk – chachuk. It is the fourth or fifth train since afternoon, and every time the little one had rushed to the balcony to catch a glimpse of a retreating metal caterpillar. This time it is a train with a red engine and blue carriages, the dark boxes of the windows move along and create the illusion of a moving filmstrip. The mother sips her ginger tea, she prepares it with as much love as she does the chocolate milk for the child.

The boy dips his glucose biscuit into his tumbler and quickly pulls it out, after hundreds of such biscuits he has mastered the fine art of having the biscuit soak just enough milk before it turns to a soggy blob that will plop into his milk. If some biscuit does make its way into the milk, the boy grimaces, he doesn’t enjoy the altered taste of his beloved chocolate milk, the biscuit adds a pasty taste that just isn’t right. He takes a bite, careful not to topple the balance of a moist biscuit lest it fall onto his shirt. He continues to gaze at the passing train, spying a bit of silver lining the windows of the deep blue carriages. The curved sides of the bridge look just like the ones he builds in his game of Lego. His toy train doesn’t have as many carriages though.

The train chugs off, it only jumps into view for a few seconds before it disappears into the thick urban landscape. The mother brushes the hair out of her son’s left eye, pats him on the head and looks across at the now-empty bridge. There will be one more train soon.