Writing from the Solitary: In an age of screens, an anthology confronts our loneliness epidemic

Indeed, the Introduction by the editors, Priyanka Sarkar and Semeen Ali, mentions how the anthology is “a gathering of voices… they have stepped forward to take loneliness out of the shadows, to articulate it…”

It is this articulation that runs like a thread through an eclectic collection of essays, short fiction, conversations and poems, which are diverse in their substance as well as style. For instance, the essay by Sumana Roy, ‘Dying Alone’, sets the tone of acute observation about the lack of use of almost everything — furniture, food, crockery, towels — around her that living alone brings, and of how one lives alone and dies alone, “perhaps because I’m alone here.”

Poet Mani Rao describes the feeling of being alone in ‘The Large House’, even when you are in a group or with a family:

In such a large house
don’t you feel
lonely?
…family
is exactly
a large house
Each person a big room
Each unique room incompatible with every other….

Arunava Sinha’s translation of Maradona by Kamal Chakraborty: “The wind — food — their feathers flying,” and the poems in ‘The Birdwatcher’ by Nitoo Das, “Ceaseless beginnings flat like the verdigris/ light on the flycatcher and the slate/ bait of the parakeet…” offer other perspectives of loneliness — of questioning and differentiating between a performance versus the truth.

Bhaswati Ghosh’s essay, ‘The Mysterious Gifts of a Fake Snake’, on the other hand, describes loneliness as a snake that had her mind in its grip. She talks about the constant anxiety it caused in her life, until she travelled for a writing fellowship, and how the solitude there finally led her to accept and confront the fear.

While lack of space prevents one from mentioning more selections from the anthology, an important perspective is offered by the conversation between Jeet Thayil and Nilanjana S Roy in ‘The Pleasures of Solitude’. It brings out the importance of solitude, which is different from loneliness, for a writer.

As Thayil mentions, “…what we do is sit alone in a room for hours…that kind of solitude is not just necessary but essential for the kind of work a book involves…”. Nabina Das’ essay, Lonelitude and Love: Building Castles in Moonlight, also describes how “the loneliness of writing is as much or more overpowering than the loneliness of love, and empowering in equal measure.”

In today’s day and age, when connection is increasingly being replaced by screen time, and loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions, this anthology is important in the multifaceted views it offers on this phenomenon. Most importantly, perhaps, is the acceptance of the fact that it is a part of each of our lives, an observation made by Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’ in his poem, ‘Main Akela’, translated by Ruth Vanita in the anthology:

I, alone,
See approaching the evening of my day…
I know I’ve crossed the rivers and streams
I had to cross.
Laughing, I see,
No boat remains.

(Ray is a New Delhi-based poet, writer and editor)