That’s exactly the Esperanto that Shobha De (then Rajadhyaksha) and her colleagues began to write in Stardust in the seventies. There was something slightly impolite about that language, wasn’t there?—all right for schoolgirls to speak in, but to write in…?

*   *   *

ALTHOUGH SO MANY PEOPLE write these days (so many, it’s difficult to imagine), you feel the world you know, the India you know, is still to be written about. Is this merely solipsistic? Shobha (I hope she won’t mind me using her first name) has scratched the tip of the iceberg, though; I now feel that her life is also in some way mine—I don’t mean the celebrity; though even celebrity emerges from that book, Selective Memory (what an apposite, an inevitable name!), as a kind of character, a desirable freak that some people got to know in Bombay at that time, rather than as destiny. Even the portfolio of photographs, the author now with Amitabh Bachchan, or Indira Gandhi, or Nari Hira, looks slightly doctored, as if all the photos of Shobha De had been taken on the same day, for she is the same—perpetually young, her carved face immutable—in all of them, while the others—Nari Hira, Amitabh Bachchan—are fraught with contingency, they look like trespassers. I’ve seen the tricks that are possible these days; that’s why John F. Kennedy looks like an intruder, alone and slightly nervous, when he’s made to shake hands in Forrest Gump with Tom Hanks without being certain he’s in the movie.

But that’s not what I mean when I say that Shobha De’s life is in some way mine. It’s not the celebrity; it’s the detritus that we all know but no one speaks of, the banal, briefly glittering sequence of events, where the heart beats underneath. That is what I’m concerned with; because that is when I feel myself in the silence, on the edge of the words, not yet a writer (just as she is not yet a writer) but listening to what we in the upper middle class in Bombay frivolously call “life.” Because, however much we insist, we will never be quite writers; literature is not where we start from. All those years, going to the matinee, borrowing books from the British Council, thinking you might be acquiring a boyfriend—literature was not what proscribed or described those episodes. Of course, we read books (I think Shobha did as well), and I even studied English literature; but that was studying other people’s lives, authors and characters. Where our hearts beat, that was secret, or disappointing, or satisfying, or trivial, too trivial for it to become words or a story. Really, our lives were glamorous and happy but too trivial. And it is there that I must begin, that is why all of us writers who have still not written a word are impatient to disturb the silence.