Why Do I write ?

I clearly remember the day I wrote this piece. I was in final year of college and I wished to be anywhere but there. All I wanted was to become a writer, write poetry to make sense of life, and then write fiction to escape. This piece always reminds me of passion and yearning for more. I hope it reminds you something that makes you feel alive and then pick it up again.

I cannot start this , whatever form it might take; but I cannot start by saying when people ask me why I write here’s what I say . I cannot start this testimony , yes testimony; with a lie . People never ask me why I write, sometimes a rare enthusiast will ask, what are you going to write about . Never why. I figure, people dread the depth of this question , the lurking extractive force, the impending surrender of the person in question, the unknown answer that would insurge from god knows which abysmal darkness of the heart. You don’t want to ask a question you don’t want the answer to.

Here in a smallish font, I’m prepared to answer a question that might even reshape my sense and ability in my skill.? I sit, with a pencil stuck in rotation in my mouth and try to conjure up a worthy answer, that might make me seem worthy to be even called and recalled as a writer . My forehead perspires, thinking about the gravity of this inheritance.

A writer? Am I a writer? Tolstoy was one, Hemmingway was one, so was Gabriel Garcia Marquez, so was Maya Angelou, so were thousands of these legends and visionaries, activists and heroes, wives and daughters and sons and fathers. My pen shakes as my hands tremble to write under the significant pressure of; god rest their souls, these gods. I am weak , my words don’t shake the earth , they don’t make people vomit with indignation , I don’t get proud glances or hoots. I wonder if that’s the nature of written word; maybe its best understood when the writer is removed from the narrative or the world at large.

I continue to write and punch letters in a black keyboard. Is Charles Dickens shaking his head? This is not a travesty sir, I cannot hope to make you proud. I can only hope to lessen my misery momentarily until the urge of a thought strikes me.? It is a seed that is infinitesimally small, sometimes a sound or a smell, I once wrote twenty seven pages enraptured by a smile of a little kid at a tea stall.

If I don’t write those words and letters and thoughts, they spiral inside my body, tightening around my chest ; coiling my lungs. I cannot breathe , I cannot eat or see or sleep until I let them out . God knows how blatantly obtuse my thoughts are and I am an opportunist by all means . I chose to let my passions out in the written word, where curse words appear harmless and any number of malevolent subjects can be discussed?with an intellectual air . I am afraid my Sir ; very afraid, if I don’t commit this impertinence, my words will free themselves .

Sir , bestow upon me the wisdom of simpler times, when you wrote to address your inner commotion.? Did anyone dare to give Sir Charles Dickens an admonition about the way of life he had embarked upon ? or is it only me ; Ekta lakhera , who gets all sorts of dodgy advices that I ascertain to be coming from a place of insincerity and plain ignorance ? I read and read and read the word of you and your peers , looking for the faintest hints of golden knowledge . I sleep with books under my pillow so I dream of books . I eat pages of great novellas so I can digest the passions and fury of the writers who once must have sat down somewhere ; unsure where to? start, I want to find that beginning . I want a miracle to attach to my womb so I can too give birth to a pure creation of myself . A duplicate of me , but in papyrus. I would then be, in my eyes a mystic, a witch , what’s a more sophisticated word? ? An alchemist ,converting shitty 21st century? figures of speech into the pinnacle of language , into pure gold.

I write , sometimes with my eyes closed. I am writing when I am scribbling away at the back of my college register , like a thief; like a perpetrator of hypocrisy , but I am writing . I am writing when I’m supposed to be toiling away at a hard earned job. I am writing mostly and surely when I am not supposed to be writing . I am writing in my head, dreaming of writing, smiling and thinking how wonderful is the joy of having a sanctuary in a white sheet of paper, how in luck I am to have something that tethers me to this world and separates me from it .

I think you hurt me when you asked me, why is it that I write. I’ll see myself out.