I FELT THE URGE to write this after I began to read Shobha De’s memoirs. If she can write her memoir, I thought, so can I. For who would have thought, Shobha De least of all, that one day she would write her life story for other people to read? She had been an ordinary, if beautiful, girl who got recruited (as she says) from a middle-class home into modelling, never particularly interested in studies (I was the same at her age), and then, through accident and ambition, got married into one of Bombay’s richest families, started her own magazine and began writing her own gossip column, got divorced, reinvented herself as a writer of middles for Bombay newspapers, married again, became India’s first successful pulp novelist, and now has written her memoirs. Through what a strange chain of events people arrive at the world of writing—and Shobha De’s tranformation has been one of the most unexpected in my lifetime. It shows me the endless possibilities of the society we have lived in. And I ask myself the question: if she can be a writer, and inscribe her thoughts and impressions in language, why not I?

There’s the question, of course, of who would want to read my memoirs, or whatever it is I’m setting out to write—because I’m not altogether sure what it is. But (although I’ve never seen myself as a writer before) these are questions, I’m certain, that preoccupy (inasmuch as I can enter the mind of a writer) all who write (it’s an area I know little about). And it consoles me to think that at one time every writer must have done what I’m doing now, starting out and not knowing where it was leading to. It’s not a feeling you can communicate to someone who’s never tried it. Some people, I’m sure, end up taking this route by intention and dedication, after years of preparation—my daughter has a friend who, at thirteen, is already writing lovely poems that have been published in Femina and her school magazine; I’m sure she’ll be a fine writer one day, and she looks set for that course. Others, like myself, and probably Shobha De, arrive at that route by chance (although Shobha De very differently from me), and it’s from her that I take a kind of courage, that she should have ended up a writer, although it makes me smile even as I say it.