When I looked out of my window and saw the youths crossing the bridge towards the rising sun, I decided to go out and get a life.

There were six of them, three boys and three girls, walking in pairs, in a procession. Watching them, I felt curiously breathless; their beauty was astonishing. The sun was shining straight into their faces, accentuating the comeliness of their features. They were like those rare, multi-coloured birds one sees in the zoo; their laughter was birdsong.

I wanted to call out to them and invite them to my room, but when I looked round the room a deep despair overcame me: unwashed dishes in the corner; unmade, book-covered bed; papers and pens strewn all over the table; and above it all the reading lamp throwing a weak, ghostly light.

Now they were almost at the end of the creaky iron bridge that straddled the huge gully that ran beside my compound. Ah, I thought, that I were one of them, out in the sun with a girl and so free. Perhaps I should return to bed, take an overdose of Valium and sleep. Let the world go on without you. Nobody would miss you – they never really do, do they? A day passes and a neighbour peeps in and says, ‘Hey, you were not out yesterday.’ Another day, and another day, and the enquiries stop. You are forgotten in the stymied, sense-dulling miasma of existence. And you lie there dead, or simply hibernating. It is as if you never really were.

I decided to get a life. ‘I am only twenty-five, for God’s sake!’ I said to myself.

For the past two years I had been locked in this room, in this tenement house, trying to write a novel. For my bread I taught English and literature an hour daily, minus Sundays, in a School Cert. preparatory class run by a woman who always looked at me suspiciously, as if wondering what I did for a living. I looked at the papers spilling out of a thick folder on my table. The words and sentences, joined end to end, looked ominously like chains, binding me forever to this table. I felt a deep, almost fanatical loathing for them. Two years, and still no single sentence made sense to me. Standing by the window, staring at the manuscript, I felt, with epiphanic clarity, that if I sat down and picked up my pen and added a sentence more to this jumbled mass, I’d die. The uncompleted novel would grow hands of iron and strangle me to death.