.. DiVyA ..

I was eight years old. One significant day, I was lying on my stomach with a pillow on the bed and I had a blank sheet of ruled paper in front of me. I picked up my pen. I had just started using the ball pen, and, being tired of the cumbersome ink pen, the ball pen was a blessing in disguise. The whole feeling of seeing a small ball move with ink under my hand was brilliant. It gave me a weird sense of power. I felt at that moment, with a shiver that I will write: I will write: my pen will be my source to power. Someday everybody will know and acknowledge what I feel.
That momentous hour I decided that when I grow up, I will be a writer and give a voice to my experiences; everybody will have to acknowledge what I feel, what I think and what I experience emotionally. Soon, I took a fancy to pens. I used to buy pens so often that my pencil box used to be the envy of many. Every new pen under my small palms and fingers was a new experience leading to even newer web of words. I thought of something new when I used a new pen. Sometimes I wrote with pencils, just because you could erase what you wrote very easily. I knew that writing was a process which involved ripping my selfhood apart but I also knew that I had to do it. Writing was my way of giving, giving people the knowledge that I have, and the kind of experiences they might have overlooked in their daily routine. Thinking was my forte, writing was my passion; sometimes however, it bordered on being a need. To survive I had to write.
From very early in my life I walked in matrixes, had an eye for detail, and, felt things which nobody else understood when I tried to explain to them. My hand used to itch just wanting to do something: I used to do things which nobody even thought of. To quench my itch, I started painting, which involved using the hands to an even greater extent. I remember having cut my mother’s sari once to make a dress for my doll; I even climbed up a small near the ceiling with the help of a suitcase and a stool. I sometimes felt that what I felt was paranormal, weird in certain ways. When I read books, they came back to me in a film like manner in my dreams. When I was very young and most children hated studying, I would coil myself in a corner and end up reading most of the story books even before the session started. Even my dreams used to be about various things which a wakeful conscious mind might ignore.
When a person writes then it would be wrong to think that the person writing it and the writer are the same. After a point of time in writing the writer is so away from himself that the human being writing it vanishes while the characters speak for themselves; they stand out on their own. Writing is something that demands the writer to take on differing identities and play different roles. When the writer writes then it is only the character which lives: it surfaces itself only through the words of the writer. Writing is an art: the art of putting up masks. A writer is never born. The times make it the way it is. Now you may object to my using the word “it” for a writer but a writer has no sex. It is androgynous: it can write about all kinds of experience; only when the writer and the protagonist are same that the writer ought to take up a sexual identity. After this I want to start my stories. The above are some of the principles I believe in.
Another kind of phase in my experiences with writing came with puberty. I wrote when I fancied a man or when I felt I was in love, or rather suffered from an infatuation. I wrote for the man, to tell him in my imagination what I felt and went through. My first story spoke of lovers united in feeling, and how they came together after some years had gone by. This phase continued till I was twenty two, till I exhausted myself of all feelings of this kind. Now the desire or rather the need to write comes without a man: now I write for myself, to protect my being, to do what I have come here for! I can’t write love poems anymore, and I wonder, have I lost all feeling?
I have a feeling now that the man I eventually get married to, I know there is no escape, how will my writing mind react to it? Will it go back to its teenage infatuation phase or will it become mature? I myself don’t know what the next development will be. But one thing I know for sure, for a man to really understand me, he will definitely have to understand my development as a writer and the desire to be an author. He should have gone through all the phases I have been through to understand what I have been through and how I will react to anything in the world. Such understanding is something that one can only dream of, not expect in reality. I had once been told, writing is a very lonely process and to understand the kind of loneliness one goes through, you have to be in a writer’s shoes. I have embraced loneliness for the rest of the life I live and I don’t really have too many expectations from anybody. Maybe, I again say, maybe, because I have no expectations, my marriage may be a happy one. Marriage and life, after all are interplays of expectations and frustrations. It took me so many years to understand that!
I have to go through this purgatory process to sustain myself. Writing from this day will be my way of living and earning. It started as desire to wield power and now it has become a need. I think that if I go on with writing with the pace that I am doing at present, I will either become mad or somebody great. Life is weird in its meandering ways. We try to be ourselves and end up being an image of what we want to be.