Writing: A Conversation The Reader Completes

You sit at your desk and write, some days with the sun on your back, some days with rain in your heart. Most days in your jammies. Then one day you want to head out, get a break, write in a cafe. Too much noise, too many people - who distract you because you are an observer and you don’t miss the goth girl who compulsively twirls a strand of hair, the girl and boy who bond on the next table over frappuccino and math homework, the poodle in his raincoat outside - and you miss your corner and head back. 

It’s the corner where the secrets you didn’t know you had have tumbled out, where words have a way of finding an egress, where cumulative years of squatting down have led to some spectacular days of Zen-like writing... Where you read the words aloud because the tongue knows when their rhythm is right. Where you test alliteration and assonance, where the pause reveals itself or a comma sounds unnecessary. The corner where you first hear your words. Surreal. Because they have transitioned from somewhere within you - mind/heart/jigar - to the computer screen to the ether in which we live - from thought to text to sound.

And one day, you get lucky and find yourself listening to your words being read by another. Aloud. And it is the most uncanny feeling - scary, sublime, sumptuous. Writing, after all, is a conversation that the reader completes. 

At the book launch of The Taj Conspiracy in Bengaluru, listening to an excerpt from the book read by a theatre artist                                     © Manreet Sodhi Someshwar