Monday, January 8, 2018

Pains of being a Writer

At the mercy of the sea I sat at a fisherman's hut reading 'Slow Man'. It was a great novel filled with impeccable writing and readable contents.

The beach was a mere ten feet away from my chair, which was just a bamboo bed built for the fisher folk to rest or sit after their fishing work. That means the tsunami can wipe me away making my life more peaceful. Olive green waters rose and swam back into their own hands by licking into the salty sand with happy hopes of wiping away humanity.

I was an outsider by all means with my book and my need to digest words and write them back.
After an hour of reading I had to close my book for the fisher folk had arrived earlier than usual. 'Off you go away'. 'You mongrel' typical of Indian hospitality. Perhaps they smelt my 'readingness' from afar.


And as usual I had to let go off my perch and leave for the streets. The street lay ahead like a flattened snake circling around a faith center which had departed people in the grave yard. I looked at them with surprised eyebrows to find out what pain they endured to be lying there and turning into beautiful pink flowers.

The writer in my country is a rarest specie that seldom is seen. I always try to befriend writers in a faint hope of creating a writers group where we can share and learn from each others writing. But I guess writers are solitary and cannot mingle. Yet I have been witness to colleagues busy in chat and masala talks about the previous days adventures, and nothing vaguely related to writing ever crossed their conversations, ...ever!

Yet I always longed to be circled by writers, young and impatient who wanted to get the words off their chest. Perhaps I never approached the right crowds in this endeavor. It never occurred to me that I was paddling the same boat at the same place for decades and there isn't any water left to take me across to the other bank.

Why couldn't I be like those happy writers in newspaper publishing houses brimming with assignments to travel the seas and explore the world and also write about it? Why was I this unfortunate writer who was always verbally abused for sitting at my desk and writing? Why should I be this joker or porn star entertaining people with my body and verbal skills?

Isn't being a writer more than enough to be one? Should I wear so many hats to remain a writer? These are just few of the pains while being a writer.

One of the most saddest part in my life is the constant presence of evil. Out of nowhere comes a person who disrupts my writing. I don't know who these people are!

Whenever I sit to write in my room I get loud noises and banging on my door. They don't want me to write. They don't want me to live. They want me dead!

It's not a joke it is a fact of my sad story. The only place I am allowed to write in India is a browsing center where people aren't bothered about my presence and are happy to get a price for the time I spend there. A business proposition I suppose.


But that mans just to write for an hour I need to offer a dollar or more.

This is my situation. A group of people waiting to disrupt my writing and anther group in the office waiting to verbally abuse me. I sometime wonder how other writers are allowed to write in peace.Do they have a magic in their hands to get hours of peaceful writing time? How do they do it?

This is my pain. Not being able to write because I wasn't born to think or write. The society decides what I must do. Why do I have to live like this? Rather cut my veins and lie obscure waiting for the graves.