I’M UNCOMFORTABLE beginning at the beginning. It’s not because I’m clever, but because it’s a difficult thing, writing. And I haven’t had any past experience. I used to write poems, of course, when I was quite young; they were passionate and formless but somehow arranged themselves into short and long lines and stanzas without my having to do much about it. Later, they stopped altogether. I suppose it was because I became not unattractive and, after an awkward puberty, when I wasn’t sure of myself, acquired a circle of friends and a “social life.” You will wonder at the inverted commas, but, in the seventies, so much of what we did was in inverted commas; “sex,” “love,” “going all the way”; we all talked about it, but half of it was conversation and fantasy, we didn’t go “all the way.”

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I THINK THE EARLY YEARS in Patna, though my memories of them are few, and often random and disconnected, must be the reason why I’ve never felt I belong here—to Bombay—although this is where I grew up. Yet I never think of myself as a person who “comes from Bombay”; it’s the place I’ve lived in much of my life. Where do I come from, then? I don’t have to go to Gujarat to visit my Gujarati relatives; many of them live here, on Peddar Road. My nani, my mother’s mother, died in a third-floor flat in a building at the turning of Peddar Road and Gamadia Road.

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YOU ASK ME if I feel more South Indian or Gujarati—I don’t know. I know a few Telegu words, but my father didn’t speak very much in Telegu at home. The language my parents spoke to each other was English. I grew up in a fifth-floor apartment on Nepean Sea Road, very near where the small flyover was built in the seventies. How many walks my friends, especially Kamini, who lived in the same building, and I took across that flyover!

Kamini and I, too, spoke to each other in English, although her parents were from the Andhra as well; but it never occurred to us to experiment with Telegu in our conversation. I don’t think we even had a clear idea that we were South Indians, I at least in part; the solidarity we felt had to do with the fact that we went to the same school. The English we spoke, I now realize, was garnished with Hindi words for effect; it all sounded very clever-clever: “Didn’t do too well in my chemistry paper. Chalta hai, yaar!” This was our Esperanto, and we never thought to think it anything but English; it wouldn’t have done to speak in any other kind of English. The girls who spoke in “perfect” English were slightly ridiculous and were supposed to be “goody-goody.”