My
struggles
What
struggles? I’ve never struggled in my life! Actually, I’ve had rather an easy time of it. When I was three, I
went with my parents for an interview for admission to kindergarten. The kindly lady asked me some simple question, which
I answered with an almighty bawl. The poor woman took me in just to stop my howling, which, by all accounts, was audible within
a five-mile radius.
The
kindergarten teachers regularly updated the parents about their wards’ progress. During one such parent-teacher tête-à-tête,
my mother gave vent to her concern that, like my sister, I too would turn out to be a quiet child. You know, the kind of kid
that keeps brooding in a corner of the room. My teacher, on hearing my mother’s concern, grimly informed her that her
fears were completely unfounded – I was quite unlike my sister. In fact, she said, I chattered so much that she would
soon be forced to tape my mouth shut.
It
is precisely for this reason that I became a writer.
Everyone
thought it would be a splendid idea if, instead of exercising my vocal chords so much and so frequently, I transferred my
spoken gems to paper. It would augur far better for my future, they said. And so, here I am.
The
first piece of fiction I wrote was when I sent in a leave application to my boss. Oh sorry, actually it was much before that.
Let me just jog the memory cells a bit.
Ah
yes! It was at age 12, when I was giving my exam for English Literature. The question paper demanded a story involving an
aeroplane.
I
remember that all the time while I was writing, the invigilator stood behind me reading my output, having long abandoned her
invigilation duties. At that time I thought my story was brilliant. But now I realise we were both (the invigilator and I)
off our rockers.
A
plot in which a planeful of grown-up, mature adults mistakenly believed an alarm clock to be a time-bomb, was juvenile, to
say the least.
Thankfully,
I have grown up now, and my writing has matured considerably, as is evident in these pages that you see.
