As it happened, in 2006, a writer friend – unknowingly – taught me to read properly. Through text messaging. A word or sentence resting like a butterfly on the illuminated screen. Magical. I would flip open my cell-phone and read the words again and again, drawing my eyes together, forcing them to focus. This was about the time I drove friends and family up the wall with my incessant text-messaging.
Then it struck me to cut-out a horizontal window in a sheet of paper and trap sentences inside the rectangular opening. Hard work going over the pages in this manner, but my eyes felt less intimidated by the imprisoned words and swiftly brought to my attention any deviant behavior. Still, when it came time for meeting with my editor at HarperCollins India, I was unprepared for the extent of revising I was expected to do.
I can’t do it. I text messaged the writer friend.
Get on with it, was the reply.
The message on the screen had a mesmerizing effect on me. I shut up and got on with it, doing my final rewrite at the Ravi Shankar Center in Delhi and then a sentence-by- sentence polish upon my return to Houston. In the first sentence alone, I changed the verb from put, to applied, to touched, to pressed, to smeared and eventually to stabbed, Tara stabbed a dot of red to her forehead. There were only a few thousand more sentences to cut or clean up. If my manuscript had not been snatched out of my hands and sent to the press, I’m sure I’d still be working on it :)
"If you don't wear a sari, there will be no launch today," my sister said when I laid out my black T-shirt and black trousers to wear for my book launch in the Rock Garden, at the India International Center, Delhi. It had been so long since I wore a sari and hence the gracelessness -- I'm the one in the black sari, oh at least I got to wear black! I'm laughing so hard at this picture.
7 comments:
Yes U got to. After all, this is ur first book and u r launching in the capital of India, U got to wear something that makes more sense here.
I got out of the sms-phobia almost 2 years back. I'm in peace now.
Yet to practice "the salesman tactic" in my writing....
I had forgotten how to walk, stand and sit gracefully in a sari. I looked more comical than elegant :)
Your blog over the last few months has provided a fascinating window into the creative process of which most people, I’m sure, are unaware. I gather that you worked on The Finger Puppet for several years writing and rewriting to the point where you must have felt that you could neither see the end nor remember the beginning. As non-writer I never really gave it much thought before but assumed that writers by their very nature were able to clearly see the whole outline in their minds and then steadily commit it to paper, page after page, punctuated with a deft turn of phrase here and a flash of imagery there.
I cannot imagine how you must have felt when your “child” was rejected, this was part of your soul and they didn’t want it. It stretches belief yet further that you persevered until you found sight in a blind world.
Your first pages provided a delightful insight into Indian life and the one line images, ‘an urchin child sharing a crust with a stray dog’ for example, leapt into my mind more clearly than a picture. Your mischievous humor, “Sister Kili recited our Irish sounding names” was a joy. Now I read further and the clouds gather like a prairie winter storm promising to strip life and love from anything in its path. I hope that this book will bring spring before it ends.
One side effect of this book was the other day when saw a licence tag with two little green hand prints on it, Prevent Child Abuse. In the past it blended in with the hundreds of other little messages that drift, no matter how worthy, like leaves past my consciousness. Now I will never see one again without thinking.
Thank you for persevering Anu, you are an inspiration.
oh i have worn sarees for so many school functions. and i fall flat on my face atleast once.
Greenhouseman (I know you!), sorry, I didn’t respond earlier to your comment on the writing process.
Writing varies for each person, I’m sure. I know for a fact that Tarun Tejpal wrote The Alchemy of Desire in some sixteen months. I also heard of a booker winner goddess in India who revised only two pages in her entire novel. Wow.
As for me, because I inherited my father's English and because I'm pretty eloquent and because I was filling up 3-ring binders with pages and pages of my writing, I thought I'd be done with the novel in a year of so. But I had not taken into account the darkness that lay in my path. If it weren’t for some extraordinary people in my life, I would have headed straight for the madhouse.
Rima, I used to even sleep wearing a sari when I was in India :)
"tara stabbed a dot of red to her forehead." reading this again in the book two days back, and now over here. i will never forget this line.
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