Image: Debby Hudson for Unsplash
The women in my family are meticulous record keepers. We aren’t athletes or statisticians or historians. Or perhaps we are, in some abstract way – our will and stamina is laser focused on collecting data, analyzing them collectively, archiving and regurgitating our findings. My mother kept a record of money and jewelry. Meticulously counting the sheaves of paper, arranging her dazzling gold in red velvet cases. She also noted the jewelry of other folk, particularly the women at weddings. It was her way of estimating her self-worth. If a woman was intimidating with her intelligence, hospitality or conversational skills, it never mattered to my mother. What she sized up was her collection of necklaces, bangles and earrings. It wasn’t enough to have plenty – there was the added layer surrounding purity, the thickness of the bangles, whether the diamonds dazzled if you saw them across the room or just from up close. There was also the matter of taste, of heritage – “is this Kundan or Meenakari?”
My grandmother, on the other hand, assessed recipes as if her life depended on it. She knew which of her relatives made the best fish curry, the best Chicken ghee roast, the best mango pickle or pork fry. She tasted food like it was a psychological experiment – sizing up the chef from the balance of flavors.
Most women have this quirky record-keeping obsession. Saris, flowering plants, knitting, TV shows, neighborhood gossip, painting, curios, but it was people-watching that really appealed to me. A trait I now recognize is as integral to a good writer as a well-stacked bookshelf or a cache of vocabulary. So I may have inherited this skill, but it served me well. It helped me find my own place in the world. I cultivated it, really sharpened it so that it solidified my sense of purpose. Through writing workshops, I collected every fragment of bone that I found that could build a skeletal character. With personal perspective, I assembled the flesh – the dialogue, the emotions, a lingering smile, and a nervous foot shuffle. But the real blood that made a full-bodied story was the observations and anecdotes that I shamelessly borrowed from people - a commuter pretending to read a book but their eyes never move at all, a supermarket teller’s effortless efficiency, a lover’s desperation, a parent’s deepest fears. Strangers are harmless targets and my stories were working. I had a proven method that worked. Until, with an air of nonchalance, I waded into danger. I should have seen it coming.
Where I went wrong was obvious. See, my mother and grandmother, they did all this as a means of survival, like journaling or yoga – there was hushed conversation but they never shared the contents of a diary or performed a Virabhadrasana. I, on the other hand, was accumulating information and then laying it out for all to see. It was selfish, I agree - all I ever wanted was for my writing to be recognized. I remembered reading somewhere that creative writing wasn’t just a product of imagination and vivid descriptiveness. It was archival – it housed some truth, immortalized people, places and events. It was impossible to have a career in writing – any story or poem - without opening up the windows to your heavily guarded life. Every piece of writing was a hostage negotiation with the self – offer up a part of myself or a friend or family member. In my writing, my grandmother was an exploitive venture capitalist. My mother found her way into a novella about an art gallery owner. A terrible ex-lover stayed a terrible ex-lover, because he deserved it. But almost everyone else got the honor of a well-concealed character. When you’re young, unattached, traveling and on the carousel of life, you have a pool of changing friends, colleagues and relationships, and a wealth of experiences and people to draw inspiration from. None of the permanent people in your life ever feel threatened because the chance they will end up pinned to a page is negligible. It’s just simple mathematics. But when you cross that threshold and you’re married, you’re trying to whip up a feast in a famine. Your circle shrinks – you only have a small set of people that you have the time to associate with. Then the stories become risky. Of course, I don’t recognize it until it’s too late. When my best friend drunkenly called her ex-boyfriend on her bachelorette weekend and they expressed their regret at missing their chance with each other, it was a real-life disaster but an irresistible plot to me. I couldn’t pass it up. It would eat me alive. When it was published a few weeks after her wedding, everyone knew who it was really about – everyone that mattered; i.e. the groom. I’d learnt my lesson – timing was everything. But it took years of therapy and cutting off all ties from me in order for my best friend’s marriage to survive (they seem blissfully happy, and aesthetically so, on Instagram now, but that’s possibly because she’s only friends with photographers now, never writers, so perhaps we will never know the truth). Every story was a test of the strength of my relationships. A few other people were unsuspecting victims – a philandering uncle, a drug-addled cousin, a broke colleague, a friend in a dead-end relationship – I was willing to sacrifice all of them on the altar of my craft. I paraded them on a plank and they dropped off the radar. They took a few others with them – record-keepers of all kinds are everywhere, you see. As long as the story worked, I convinced myself that it didn’t matter; it was all worth it because this sort of thing was an occupational hazard. It was going well too, until I became too complacent and light-handed with my life and with my writing.
As a happily married woman, I had nobody with momentum in my life that I can use on the page. Everything was too calm, too wonderful, and too perfect to be profound. My interactions were so normal, so trivial, and so routine. I suppose I could have written about domestic life – about brushing my dog and hunting for ticks and what that says about my anxiety and the need to control things. Or about how every stage of marriage is like a class you must graduate before you are inducted into the next level. Double dating, becoming a pet parent, birthing babies, sending them off to school, having baby number 2, buying a house – every advancement is a coveted promotion that is closed off to you until you attain the necessary target. All of that is good and true. But my writing had plateaued. The rejections were pouring in. My writing was too bland. To a greedy writer like me, the restlessness was eating me alive.
This was the platonic shift that birthed the fissure. “I dream about having an affair.” Six intriguing words – the first line of a new short story. Where does the character go from here? What was the dream? Why did it even occur? There was something there. It is strange that I was even writing about dreams. Nothing bothers me more than people who recount their dreams in vivid detail. It didn't happen – it was a random, subconscious conjuring that is utterly pointless to obsess over.
I don’t know why I wrote this sentence. Was I self-destructive? Did I do it for the thrill or was the material too good to resist? As a writer, was I an artist or an arsonist? So anyway, I wrote this piece about having this recurring dream of having an affair. When he sees the first sentence at the top of a Word document, he hovers over my chair and I can feel him scowling before I turn around. “It’s just fiction”, I say. He walks away because he’s non-confrontational and I sigh with relief. I should have gone after him and explained over dinner. Instead, I record this tension and write until 3 am, which is when I finally eat dinner.
I needed this story after a spate of failed submissions. I send it off to the editor of an online magazine. I think my husband has forgotten about it until he brings it up over dinner with my mother one night and she looks at me with disdain. “Retract it,” she says. “It’s bothering him.” But I had vowed never to be the kind of writer whose work was censored by the company around her. “I’ll try,” I said. But I knew I wouldn’t. The day it was published felt like a professional triumph.
My husband came home that evening, infuriated. His shirt was crumpled; his hair was in disarray – every part of him aggravated.
“This isn’t an ode to an old boyfriend. Or a kiss that changed everything in 2013.”
“Why not? It is…” I asked, my voice high-strung and traced with guilt. He cut me off.
“Because that is a litany of the past. This is like you’re reaching for a future.”
My mouth opens in urgency but no words come out.
“A future without me,” he continues.
All my life is rushing behind him like a river. The debris of all the faces I have disappointed. Clear as day. I can’t remember the details of any of my articles – not a single title. Suddenly I feel the coolness of the air-conditioning escalate – my hair is standing on end. I feel the need for a warm blanket but do not dare to make myself comfortable in this atmosphere – I do not deserve it.
“You didn’t even read the whole story,” I pleaded. I secretly wished he wouldn’t. There was nothing in there that was worth it. I longed for the life we had that had crumbled the very second I had weaved these words together. I knew this would happen and I walked into it anyway.
What would my mother say about me, I wondered. I was a woman who was allergic to imitation jewelry but wearing gold somehow made me feel inferior. What would my grandmother say? Divulging too much about my private life – scattering too much masala into a pot, hiding the real flavor of the vegetables and meat – making them indistinguishable from each other. Rookie mistakes. Complete no-nos.
“You were willing to end our whole future simply because of the opening line?” I asked him. He looked at me squarely in the eyes and walks into the bathroom. I know the answer before he says a word. I sat down on the bed in a room that would never be the same. I had never noticed all of the details as it stood now – the chipped wall paint, the dusty lampshade, the spider near the window, and the frayed end of the curtain. My fingers were itching for my notebook. I wanted to write all this down.
“Stop it, stop it. This is real life,” I said to myself. “What is wrong with you?”
I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply. I could hear the shower and it made me think of the monsoon rain. What will this short story do to us? I want to say that we survive. That things work out for us. And perhaps it will. I imagined my estranged best friend reading this story after hearing about it from another expert record-keeper. They’re everywhere. Ah, the irony, I sighed. “Touché”, I whispered to her, under my breath. “Touché, old friend.” I reach for my notebook and stare at the blank page. After scanning the room, I scribble something down with a blunt pencil. My husband emerges from the bathroom, dripping water on the cold floor. I see the warmth emanating from his glossy body and it reminds me of the plumes of steam from a cup of hot coffee. “What are you writing now?” he asks, irritably, as if the sight of my pocket notebook now repulses him. His face looks older somehow – the greys in his hair seem more pronounced. “Just the name of a photographer”, I say. “We might need one someday.”
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