This book just won't finish. I'm getting closer and closer, I see that, but I'm still not done. I have to ask myself, am I being persistent or just pig-headed?
I ask myself which school of though to subscribe to (and since the teacher fled long ago, it's up to me to flail between the two trying to come up with a decision):
On one hand, writing is 0.01% inspiration, 99.99% revision. I've heard this countless times, seen it quoted by famous writers over and over again. But they're famous, their persistence paid off, so it's easy for them to talk.
On the other, they say your first novel is your worst novel, it's your second or fourth or seventh that will actually sell. It's like what I tell my friends when they're having a hard time with a guy: if it's this much work, it's not worth it. What if I should put this one into the proverbial bottom drawer and start anew?
I used to picture the line between the two as one drawn in the sand, by one's big toe or a piece of driftwood. Now, though, it's a spiderweb, invisible but for when the sun shines onto it, revealing the places it's broken altogether, the dredges that remain clinging for dear life to some unknown entity, possibly my ego.
Just when I begin to wallow in its tender tattered state, the seeming hopelessness of it all, a small, quiet army sneaks up in the middle of the night and mends it, pushes me forth. Were it not for these people (who know exactly who they are) I would have given up a long time ago.
After this entry, a dear friend offered a quote by Ray Bradbury:
“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” --Ray Bradbury,
which tickled every fold of my brain, in particular the line:
You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.
The first library I lurked in was at the Karachi Gymkhana. I spent hours, days, years among close friends: Famous Five, Secret Seven, and on less intellectual days, Archie and the gang. It was there that I climbed the stacks like ladders, in particular the one closest to the window. At the top, I hid my favorite book (the cover bore a terribly racist depiction of Chinese men peeking out from straw barrels) so that it would still be there when I returned and I would not face the stress of an absent friend.
In Canada, the bookshelves weren't as exciting to climb but the lending limit (twenty-five glorious books at once) more than made up for it. In fact, I lurked about these shelves so much that when I applied for a job there in my early twenties, it was a no-brainer for the librarian, who had watched me grow up and had no doubt of my bookworminess.
The most titillating library I ever visited was when I came full circle back to Karachi in 2002.
I'm sure my cousin thought it would be a quick round of Frere Hall when he pulled up to its gates to show us the famous heritage building. He probably didn't expect me to actually enter the small library tucked behind the structure. He certainly didn't expect me to march on in and make myself at home.
But my feet moved of their own accord, delighting in the rickety wooden floors, the shafts of sun streaking into high up windows, lazy dust motes nearly still in the calm of the room. I passed rows of men reading the paper at heavy tables, vaguely processing that I was the only female in there, that all eyes were on me, but my feet had found their destination.
I climbed the circular stairs which groaned under my weight from years of disuse (or possibly my increased paratha/biryani/kulfi intake). I ran a finger along the endless leather bound volumes, pulled one out, breathed in the musty perfume.
A frantic librarian chased me back down- the upstairs is off limits madam- and as he escorted me swiftly to the exit, I inhaled one last time the musty air, filled my lungs till they hurt so I could carry it with me, reveling in my sublime foolery.
Today is Pakistan's Independence Day. Today, I finished the (hopefully) last draft of my novel, which is set in the country of my birth.
We all hear about Pakistan in the news, we all know the other buzz words that follow in the same sentence. But the Pakistan I remember so vividly is different.
My Pakistan was so hot that after a rigorous game of hide-and-seek in the compound, I could squeeze the sweat from my sudrah. After an evening of swimming at the Gymkhana, where I always won the freestyle at the annual swimming contest, I cradled hot-from-the-tandoor naan in my lap in the back seat of the car, head spinning from too many dives to the bottom of the pool. Once a week, I stood quivering in Sister Bergman's office at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, unable to explain how it was I'd lost my Blue House badge yet again.
On the night we left for Canada, my best friend, Mehereen, and I stood in the passage of Nani Nana's house in front of the lattice work through which I had always been able to see her apartment, hugging and crying our goodbyes.
I went back twelve years later to a different Pakistan. Each day brought forth a torrent of memories, wave after wave of things that no longer were. I wasn't allowed into the pool area of the Gymkhana without a member accompanying me (no one cared I'd been the free style champion from 1986-90). We weren't allowed to enter the Convent our first two tries; Mehereen had moved away. It was a trip filled with nostalgia long felt, wishes not quite fulfilled, not fully understood in the moment.
Years after that, I began to write a novel. My main character decided to go to Pakistan. I tagged along to show her the way.
I know it's a place of perpetual turmoil. I know the political history, the literacy stats, the predictions for its future. I know that when I tell people where I was born, they judge me. I know that whatever I've made Karachi out to be in my novel comes from a place of naive nostalgia, of seeing the lassi glass half full.
But what do you do with the place that holds a part of you in its dusty grip, that calls you back to its raging sea at sunset which you know will glow brighter, thanks to the pollution in the air, than any you've seen the world over? How do you keep from tearing up when you speak to your family back home, the crows nearly drowning them out, hearing the ayah- your old ayah- come in and, you imagine, get on her haunches to sweep the patterned floor with the graying chindi in great damp arcs?
Even Pakistan's Independence Day is rife with controversy. Even in my myopic state, I see that. Yet today, like many other days, it is on my mind, in my heart.
This is a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek song I discovered in my research of Pakistani pop music. Its depiction of the state of things gets closer to the truth than I've ever managed to.
They say in order to write, you must kill the critic. You know, that little voice in your head that watches every word you write and hisses into your ear how awful it all is, forcing you to second-guess yourself till every last ounce of self-confidence is depleted and you slap shut the laptop and slump before the TV. That's the inner critic, a writer's worst enemy.
I told this to a friend who was saying her writing's crap and she described her inner critic to me (in a way that proves how un-crap her writing is). Inspired, I thought about mine.
My inner critic is a prissy Parsi girl who sits atop my shoulder twirling the end of one of her perfect plaits and, squinting at my writing, sucks in her breath sharply. "Really? You think that's how Parsis are?" she asks incredulously. "That's not how it would happen in Karachi," she laughs.
I'm from Karachi, I insist. Offering me a simpering smile, she crosses her legs daintily and lists my offenses: I was a mere child when I left, I know nothing of its politics, its history, its day to day occurrences. My Gujarati comes out a bastardized hybrid of Gujrati and Urdu and the Hinglish I've picked up from Bollywood, every other sentence caught in a downward spiral of confused tenses and misplaced pronouns till I give up and finish off in English.
I continue to type. She goes in for the kill. Didn't I attended... the Convent of Jesus and Mary, she asks, patting the emblem of her Mama Parsi Girls High School uniform.
People will see you for the fraud you are, she preens, plumping the ribbon at the end of her braid. You may as well give up now before everyone finds out, she smiles, revealing for an instant the flicker of a pronged tongue.
I wait for her to slink off to do her sadra kasti- being a good Parsi girl, she does her prayer ritual five times a day- and then, while her eyes are closed in prayer, I push her into a closet and get back to work.
She has ridiculous expectations, constantly forcing me to edit and re-edit till I go cross-eyed from staring at the computer screen and my wrists burn with tendinitis. The only way I get time off is by buying a plane ticket somewhere far away. And the pay- well, I made more when I babysat the Daruwala brothers at the age of eleven, splitting the five dollars an hour with my sister.
How do I survive? The same way all those who live under an oppressive regime do: I seek out the silver lining. I wake up at 7:50, an hour and a half later than when I was a teacher. At lunch sometimes, I sneak in a rerun of the Gilmore Girls. She does allow me to leave home early, beat traffic,and work from my car till my 6 o'clock Bollywood Cardio class- bitch don't care where the work gets done so long as it does.
I know what you're thinking: what a slacker. Phi is the real five letter word.
Luckily the nausea (when will this book ever finish), the anxiety (am I piddling away my life on this whim I once had?), the self doubt (it's been two years, oughtn't I get a real job?) still reign strong so clearly I'm doing something right.
My boss, you see, is also my PR agent, and she works hard to maintain my tortured artist-ness.
Yesterday I began a new painting. What should have been a pleasant afternoon lost in brush strokes and classical music in my sun-drenched living room was instead a nail-biting, inner-lip-chewing sweating-behind-the-knees afternoon spent sketching and measuring and colour-coordinating till I was sick to my stomach. All I had to show at the end of two hours was a 2x2 (that's inches) royal purple diamond .
I've done the same thing with this blog as well. I wondered what witty, snappy entry I could entertain you with and before I knew it, months had gone by.
What is this thing I do, this strife for perfection which leads instead to a kind of creative constipation? Why can't I just grab a canvas and splatter it with paint like I once did? Why can't I just write whatever comes to my head like I once did? Those were the good old days. If growing up means getting anal, then no thank you.
So in the interest of going back to to the way things once were, I shall attempt to write this simple straightforward blog entry whose simple goal shall be to update you on the progress of my novel.
I "finished" my novel in February. That means I got it out of my head and onto the page. Then I sent it off to a few select suckers, angelic souls who were writers or avid readers or both, whose daunting task was to a) get through it and b) tell me their thoughts (which is hard for some people to do as they don't want to hurt my feelings). And these people, these poor schmucks who never dreamed when they offered to help that I'd promptly send them 400+ pages of mush, stepped up. Not only did they read all 432 pages, but they let me pick their brains after. For hours. And hours. More on them later.
The good news was the feedback was consistent: melodramatic in places but overall passable (my words not theirs). After a couple of days of stroking and mending my bruised ego (hey, it happens no matter how sweetly and politically correctly you're told your weaknesses), I got back on the proverbial horse.
Since I'm learning and doing at the same time, it took me a while to figure out the next step: how to incorporate friends' feedback and my own, how to cut out the extraneous and deepen the good stuff, and how to do it all while maintaining the spontaneity and initial integrity of the work. So basically how to change everything and nothing all at once.
Easy peasy.
After several days- or was it weeks or maybe months- of chewing my nails to the quick, staring dejectedly into my latte (while contemplating how I really couldn't afford it as I approached my third year of unemployment) and eyeing several alternate vocations (barista, pizza dough flipper, grocery bagger at Wolfe India Bazaar where I could enjoy delightful Telegu/Hindi melodies and the soft scent of samosas that arises every time someone opens the door), I came up with a plan, a system, a way of maintaining the spontaneity of the piece but in a planned and precise manner. I made...a graphic organizer. Hey, if it helped my 6th grade students plan their stories, why couldn't it help me?
That's what I've been up to for the past days- or weeks or months. I've taken all the aspects I want to include, maintain, highlight, lowlight and made a handy dandy chart. The chart (which is freaking ingenious if I do say so myself) has allowed me to work on the novel with a birds eye view without getting caught up in the minutiae of the text.
Filling it in has been akin to having a colonoscopy while getting a root canal but, having resorted to charts in the past, I know that the next step, the writing/fixing/whatever you want to call it, will be smooth(ish) because everything is now accounted for.
I first fell in love with Shah Rukh Khan as he- and his hair- bounced around the Swiss Alps falling in love with Kajol. His
devotion to her as he followed her all the way to India, miraculously finding her in an undisclosed marigold field, his attempt to win over this man
I'm sure he's a big softie underneath
by spending morning after morning caw-cawing to the pigeons alongside the bug-eyed, deep-voiced patriarch, which 16 year old wouldn't fall in love, I ask you?
I loved the King of Bollywood through his kitschy early years filled with neon colored Gap hoodies, his dramatic years playing a steady stream of NRIs, and his melodramatic years which some say includes everything he's ever done but of course they're just jealous.
Like this clip, (begin at 1.07), pure, understated drama, subtle as a Vancouver rainfall:
My love for him caused many a domestic dispute in my personal life. My then boyfriend was not a fan of my phone's screensaver, a picture of King Khan I had begged my sister to take at a London tube station. The night before my wedding, I got an email from the Mona Khan Dance Company saying they would be dancing with SR in San Jose the next night. Fortunately, we were wed in Vancouver; it might not have made for an auspicious beginning to my marriage to be found missing at my own wedding reception.
Sadly, my undying love wavered after one too many single-syllable action movies.
But like the 30 minute conclusion of Devdas, it's a slow death, not quite there, just hovering at the haveli door, crying, dying.
And now, in a plot twist even more surprising than when his reincarnated character crosses paths with a carbon copy of the woman he loved a lifetime ago, ladies and gentlemen, Shah Rukh Khan is chasing me. Like when you're five and the boy you love doesn't love you back till you stop paying attention and then he chases you around the playground incessantly, SR is everywhere. Begging me to come back.
How else do you explain me being mid-agent-hunt, on the website of a hard core New York agent and seeing she represents this book:
You see what he's trying to do, don't you? He obviously wants me back. He's arranging it so that we'll both be represented by the same agency and then meet in Bombay or New York or his next video shoot in front of the Golden Gate Bridge or the pyramids or the Swiss Alps.
Well, Bollywood Ki Jaan, I'm married now. So the answer is obviously an unequivocal, resounding 'we'll see'.
