Yet I’m not quite sure of my English, though it’s the only language I have. My knowledge of the Indian languages is passing; I can speak a smattering of a few, but can’t read or write any one of them with authority. I was born in Patna, of a Gujarati mother and a father who is a deracinated Andhra Brahmin; my link to any Indian language became, thus, tenuous. I’m not sure who’d be interested in any of this, though; why should anyone want to know why I write in English, or who my parents were, or how they came to be my parents? But I take heart from small things, besides the uncontrollable urge to get on with the job at hand, an urge that I don’t quite understand; “small things” like the fact that a new writer comes into being almost every day. This is terrifying, but it also gives me (and, I’m sure, many others like me) the impetus to take the first step. I don’t necessarily admire all the writers around me, but sometimes it is good to have their presences about (many of them will not be heard of again) as I start out on this venture.

*   *   *

MY HUSBAND CAME IN a little earlier from the office yesterday than he usually does, energetic but starved, and he caught me sitting alone, looking out at the sea. “What are you doing?” he asked quizzically; and I started. I think I looked guilty. I knew we had a party to go to in the evening. How could I tell him that I was trying to do something I became ashamed of the moment he entered, that I was trying to frame a sentence?

*   *   *

I WENT TO a Christian school, and learnt to speak the words of the Lord’s Prayer before I knew what they were. This was in the hot hall of my convent in Patna, with a few hundred other girls, only a few of whose names I remember. I mumbled the words without knowing what they were, and never have found out; but I spoke them reverentially and grew up believing in God. Whenever I thought of a Supreme Deity, which was not often but not altogether infrequently, either, it was God I thought of, rather than “parameshwar” or “ishwar.” But I have never been inside a church, except as a tourist in Goa.