Words

All my life I have loved words. Their sound. The way they roll off differently from different tongues. What they evoke. Lemon scent. Azure sky. Cloud tufts. My father's hands. Mustard fields. Thistles in my dog's fur. Lahore. Cities I have never seen. Places I have visited without stepping out of home. Foods I have tasted yet never eaten. Scones in childhood, caviar now.

And yet, words don't flow off my tongue - they flow off my fingers. I learnt this early on. When I tried to recreate the magic of words for myself, my tongue came short - it gobbled up words, garbled syntax, and came out all clumsy. Clearly, I wasn't mean for political office.

When writing waylaid me, it reconnected me once again to a pencil and a writing pad. Feeling like my childhood self I started to scribble, tentatively at first and then furiously, scared to stop until I'd emptied myself. It almost seemed atavistic, the way in which words seemed to have a forged a path from within me to paper with me as conduit. Not surprisingly, I found it entirely magical.

Those initial days I would approach my daily writing with trepidation: would the words come? Some days they did, just a trickle, at others a torrent. I wondered at my own inconsistency, at my inefficiency - 3 hours and 2 lines to show, my engineer-MBA self questioned.

But I stuck with the ritual and learnt to listen to its rhythm. I learnt to silence my inner critic and reconnect with that child. I learnt that writing was magical but that magic demanded patience, fortitude and a whole lot of stick-with-it-iveness.

Into my twelfth year of writing there is only one thing I can say with certainty: each writing day is new, when I have no idea of what it'll yield - a trickle or a flow; all I can do is show up at my desk and hope to be rewarded.