Singh Maharaj - A Dalliance with Destiny

It was no ordinary thing to wake up one fine day in the midst of 2006 and tell myself, Today, I shall begin writing a book! It seemed quite grandiose. After all, a whole decade had gone by without my even glancing through a novel. But a decision was taken and that was that.

It took a while for me to fathom why I felt any compulsion to write, except that when the time came, I simply did! It was not as if I had experienced an unexpected event that had prompted me into a storytelling frame of mind. It was, unpretentiously, an ordinary day.

In being a writer from Africa, there is this rather challenging issue of positioning a virtually unknown city within the global context. A novelist in New York, for instance, would not think twice about incorporating a street name like Park Avenue into his prose. Even a hermit living in a cave in some secluded place would picture the upmarket skyscrapers. Alas, the very ethos of unfamiliar cities needs to be framed through a series of historical events in order to give one a genuine feel for their characters. This is the bane of us wordsmiths from the relatively abstruse world.

The surrounding within which I had to scribe my words was not poetic, nor did it indulge me in an imagined landscape of creative bursts. Rather, truly, my chosen place of crafting a tale was quite ordinary. Yann Martel gave a vivid description of his failed first attempt to pen a novel in scintillating India. Ernest Hemingway banged away at a typewriter in amorous Paris. Nadine Gordimer stood on dusty African plains with a notebook and pen in hand. I, on the other hand, had no swirling mists in my midst, no quixotic backdrops of fertile valleys below me, and had not taken any lovely, early morning walks to breathe in the brisk mountain air.

Alas, I belted out my manuscript like a kaamchor at work, in a small cubicle, when my superiors were not looking too closely, or late at night, devouring copious bags of cholesterol laden crisps, and gushing down litres of Diet Coke. It was all done on a laptop computer that allowed me to delete humdrum words and to do spellchecks along with all sorts of other wonderful things that real artistes like Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens never had access to back in their respective eras.

Writing, to me, is about what I desire as the ideal authentic setting to scribe within. I want the intense romance of it all; to be sitting in a rickety bungalow atop some quaint Indian hill station, pounding out a sybaritic novel on an old Olivetti typewriter, whilst being served lavish amounts of chai and pakoras by some coquettish maidservant, who would look a bit like some yesteryear, Indian lollypop starlet, wearing a tightly draped sari over a buxom backside, which I got to voyeuristically peek at as she retreated. Perhaps I had watched too many Raj Kapoor movies as a kid, where the heroine was always scantily clad, swinging her voluptuous bum from side to side near some burbling brook with a clay pot astride her hip.

Thus, ping-ponging between an insipid corporate milieu of dreary government and Art Deco buildings, and a lacklustre apartment block nearby where I stayed, I had completed the manuscript in some three months, about sixty thousand words. I read through it and realised that I had written a creative work of disjointed ramblings. I was forced to ask myself, perhaps egotistically, Whatever was I doing, with my credentials, penning a novel? However, the literary seed was already sown within me, and I spent the next decade and a half murdering thousands of erroneous words in my manuscript before I finally came up with a long, drawn-out answer.

I recall quite vividly the day that my darling mother took me to a prefabricated, make-do library next to the local civic buildings. It was the smell that captivated me. So mouldy yet so satisfying, making my rather sensitive nose twitch. The very first book I ever read from there was all about some poor bugger who wore mittens, if my memory serves me correctly. Of course, in Africa, we never quite knew what these woollen thingamajigs really were. Its generally an arid continent, after all. So, quite likely, it was at this moment that my becoming a litterateur was preordained. The path of self-entitled precociousness may have been thrust upon me at an early age.

A few years later, not having done our homework, one day, and fearing punishment, a friend and I managed to bring the school to a standstill for the afternoon because we insisted that we had seen a ghost in a nearby bush. Why an entire teaching fraternity would give credence to the feral imaginations of two young boys is beyond me, but it alludes to the quaintness of the times back then. So that was how the creative side was born within me, the ability to spin a yarn that people would simply