On a day that I felt like giving it my all, I started with this entry in my journal: I don’t have the discipline to finish a thought, let alone a novel; I am a writer who does not write. Today is a day like all the others, a day when nothing has changed but the cloud pattern in the sky or the pitch of the ocean, or the shade of grey feather on a grey wing. I’m sitting on the veranda at sunset, with a cup of tea, watching the world decolorise itself and trying not to think anything because I know this can only be a bad route to follow. For example, I’m thinking how ugly it is this business of starting a novel or a script or a screenplay because it has to be about ‘something’ that ‘happens’. Why do people need ‘something’ to ‘happen’? What ‘happens’ is irrelevant. Observing what happens is everything. Watching the story - not the story itself - is the performance.
I got up, got some more tea, and opened the document on which I had left this story languishing: Shiv looked at Lila sleeping. She lay on her side, head to the wall. All he could see was a mass of tangled black hair, and her right foot sticking out under the duvet, toes touching the floor. On her right arm, she wore several silver bangles. Clink. That was the sound that woke him up a few minutes ago. He had tried to stay awake until she got home last night but he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He touched the oil spill on his pillow that was her hair. It felt like a coronary infarction. Open your eyes, Lila. He rolled over so the bed squeaked. He got up, and threw a toothbrush into a ceramic mug. He let the tap run and even used the hairdryer. Eventually, she moved, flung her long hair out of her face, and smiled at him. She was saying something, but all he could hear was the rabid dog in his ribcage.
I knew this was good. I could feel their breath on my neck. But what now? I turned back to the journal: Is it because books and movies are metaphors for life, and so like life must have a beginning middle and an end? And so, if nothing ‘happens’ in the book it suggests that nothing ‘happens’ in life? As if it’s not true that life isn’t much more than a pointless string of events leading to nothing to write home about? Shouldn’t it be enough that Shiv loved Lila and Lila loved Shiv, even if a little less? Why do we have to know how it ends?
I went back to the story: Good morning, Lila says. Come here.
And back again to the journal: Writing sex well is really hard. Can’t I just stop mid-sentence and leave the rest to the reader’s imagination? I like how Mohsin Hamid does it so poetically in The Last White Man. I wish I could do that. I am amused at how Sally Rooney makes it pornographic, but you don’t notice because she’s a self-described Marxist. But back to beginnings, middles, and ends. Why? Why? Why? Is there no comfort to be found in the fact that the buck does not stop with us? That life is not about our sixty ninety, or twenty-three years, but rather an insignificant collective history of which we are an insignificant part? We are but vignettes. Very thin slices of life. Carpaccio, really. Why is this so hard for us to accept?
Nevertheless, I persisted: Lila is terrified she will marry someone ‘nice’. Someone ‘understanding’. Lila is terrified that her metaphors will stink of borrowing and that her body will decay. She is worried that she says different things in her head, stranger than those she says with her mouth. Strange things like: I will smoke daily. I will have cysts in my cervix, genital warts, and polycystic ovaries. I will torture, kill, and devour creatures capable of suffering… Lila feels she was destined for great things. She thinks that Shiv is disappointed that she devolved into everybody else.
I was veering too close to an edge. What if friends and acquaintances think they recognise themselves - or worse, me - in here? Escape to journal: At the beginning, I was convinced that nothing had any resonance in the larger scheme of things. In the middle, when I least expected it, things fit patterns, and those patterns had meaning and the meaning seemed to be beautiful and marvelous, and full of mystical significance.
This was balderdash. I closed my journal and opened the document: Shiv is counting backward from one hundred very slowly to remind himself to keep breathing when she looks at him in that way.
I closed the document and left them to it. I was not ready yet, for The End. Not today, anyway.
© Tara Sahgal
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