In 2022, when I still had the bandwidth to run a fortnightly column, I remember writing an acerbic piece on International Women’s Day: ‘Writers and Women Writers’. I was tired of being a woman-writer, I just wanted to be a writer, please and thank you. Also, could the litfests do something about the women-writing panels they stuffed with brilliant women and subsequently consigned to basements or ill-advertised lawns?
A couple of weeks later, I received an email from a reader. She was a 70-year-old retired ophthalmologist from Vellore, and she would like to send me her copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. With charming hesitation, she asked for my postal address, assuring me that this was not a scam.
We owned two copies of the book. But there was no way I was going to say no to this gift, this talisman that had appeared unbidden. Especially because, most appositely, the sender’s name was Mary — Mary Verghese. Through her, I felt a renewed connection to Mary Beton-Mary Seton-Mary Carmichael, the Marys who walk in and out of A Room of One’s Own, whose radiant prose and logic I had learnt to love, first as a literature student, then an apprentice-writer, and, finally, a teacher of critical thinking. Indeed, so powerful was its impact on my life, that, even today, when I walk across the grass on campuses, I feel a mix of guilt (is there a Beadle who will come and tell me I am not allowed to?) and thrill (I can raise, in minutes, an army of feminists to stare him down).
A couple of weeks ago, my editor asked if I would write a piece around Women’s Day for her.
I retrieved the slim, elegant edition Mary had sent me, covered carefully in cellophane, from the bookshelf. “It is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction…” I fingered the familiar words on the page, as though surprised they had remained unchanged, even though my own circumstances had changed. I said yes to my editor.
I think of myself as a writer even though I haven’t written much in the last two years. Not a shred of fiction; a smattering of personal essays — though I doubt that two short essays and one semi-long essay can constitute a “smattering”; two book reviews; a spot of academic writing; and in my translation, I am so shockingly behind that the characters appear in my dream, ghosts trapped between their two worlds.
I have a toddler in the house.
And if the distancing quality of the previous statement is to make a point, you must know that it fails on both counts. The toddler is mine. And its QED only seems to suggest a banal truism: Women with small children can’t write.
But every cell in my body opposes that thought. There must be writers with small children who are so disciplined that they write. There are certainly women with small children who do so many other difficult jobs — they cook and run labs, analyse data and write legal briefs, come up with copy for soap and deliver soap, they swab floors, they report from war-torn areas, they act. My mother had had only six weeks of maternity leave and had gone back to her college, to teach young men engineering, before her scar had healed.
There is, for me, some comfort in the collective gains of feminism. And so, counterintuitively, I feel much better if the failure is my own: I have a toddler and I can’t write.
My husband sets up my laptop. Privileges cushion my material life and — at least theoretically — safeguard my work. Other bodies have cushioned Masha, other arms have cradled her — when I have sat up sending feedback on my students’ essays. Apparently, you need a village (I am grateful to the villagers; I am also, occasionally, sharply jealous).
The problem is elsewhere. To write, one needs to pursue each thought to the ends of the earth and back to the page; to lay out a line of words, and, through them, imagine many different possibilities, many different outcomes. Then delete them all, though they have left slight impressions on the page, the dust of their elision persisting, like gentle shadows, upon the words you will eventually let stand.
To be a writer, you need a great deal of stamina.
Across the locked door, I hear a little giggle. I hear the squeak of small shoes. The squeaks now become a symphony, she begins to race, will she fall?
Everyone falls, I expect my husband to say calmly. He is already out the door.
Instead of writing in the morning as Woolf would have, when one’s energy is yet un-depleted, when it is possible that much can yet be made of the day, I potter around her. While the mountain of unfinished tasks increases an inch, I find great delight in a new word she has learnt. Cinnamon.
If you think the location of the room is the problem, I have tried to put 60 km and a two-hour-commute-at-peak-traffic between us, when I hide in my college library, to write. But halfway through the pursuit of an elusive idea, I still hear the giggle, the squeak, the cry.
I unlatch the door of the room in my head and I step out. Some days, like today, I am able to step back in.
I pick out another line of words. The black letters become green birds and fly to her through the locked door, while I stay at my desk.
Roy is a Delhi-based author and assistant professor at Ashoka University. Views are personal
