The first time I met Paroma, on the front lawns of her college in Delhi, she was wearing a beret set at an angle that brought the term “jaunty” to mind. She was also wearing a full wide smile that, coupled with the beret, conveyed warmth, friendliness and, I now realise after so many years, an inherent desire to not take herself seriously. All these years I thought of that beret as an affectation, and because I always felt that foppery and presenting oneself through clothing choices was inherently shallow, and because I liked Paroma and didn’t think she was shallow, I discounted that beret as an act of silliness, just an impulse.
In all the years I knew her, Paroma never said anything that would suggest that she might have worn that beret that day as an ironic comment on people who dressed to impress, and now that I write this down I realise that her earnest but light manner was, in fact, a lovely and attractive thing in its own right. Not being capable of taking life lightly myself, I assumed that anyone that I found worthy of taking seriously should be equally ponderous in their approach to the world. Perhaps if I had the maturity to understand that beret better at the time, things might have turned out differently, and so now, years later, I am forced to reconsider that beret just as I am forced to reconsider Paroma herself.
I met Paroma at Lady Shri Ram College where she studied when I had gone there to participate in a creative writing contest she had helped organise. The LSR Creative Writing Society was one of the few around the Delhi college scene that regularly organised creative writing competitions as part of their college festivals, and I never missed a single one if I could help it. I am not sure what the other participants or organizers thought of these competitions, but for me, they were dead serious occasions that I viewed as opportunities to actually carve out time from my engineering college schedule to write fiction and work towards my eventual goal of becoming a writer. As a result, I would meet Paroma two or three times a year during my time at IIT and get to know her as a friendly and smart person who wasn’t a direct competition because she wrote poetry, which I didn’t, and gave prose a wide berth. She graduated in 1995 and I lost touch with her, but on my first trip back to Delhi in the winter of 1996–97, I ran into a girl who had been one of her associates in the Creative Writing Society. “Paro’s in the US too! You must get in touch with her!” She gave me an email address, and so it was that in early 1997, I came back in touch with Paroma and discovered that Delaware, where she was enrolled in a master’s in communication, was barely an hour and a bit up the I95 from Baltimore.
By the time I made contact with Paroma in January 1997, a few things were already settled in my mind. The vague ideas of becoming a writer that had animated me in college creative writing competitions had been given concrete form through my encounters with the MFA grad students I had met in the film writing class. In my first semester at Hopkins, I had written a couple of stories that were completely different from the juvenilia that had won me success in college. Steve and David read these first attempts and – being largely disinterested in the setting of those stories, Delhi – gave me the kind of prose-centric response no one had ever given me. My first hazy understandings of voice and register were formed in conversation with Steve. David showed me how to rework a sentence. It sounds prosaic, but it was an electrifying experience. Even now, when I remember those days, I get a kind of shiver of excitement. I hadn’t realized that moving words and phrases around, replacing one word with another, could completely transform a sentence. Every paragraph was an emotional causeway, a map that could be redrawn by moving a sentence from one place to another, thus transporting the reader from one field of sensation to another. My conception of what it meant to be a writer developed in those days; just like the person who wants to play cricket must be a person who endlessly loves the feeling of hitting a ball with a piece of wood, a writer must be a person who loves the process of stringing words, sentences and paragraphs together, of formulating and reformulating endlessly. Today, writing it all down like this, it feels like perhaps I took it all too seriously, but at that time it was exhilarating, an Aladdin’s cave of possibilities.
A photocopy of a list of publications that accepted short fiction made its way into my hands, its glamour enhanced by the fact that the original seemed to have been typed out on an actual typewriter and by the knowledge that it had been made by a senior faculty member of the writing seminars at Hopkins who was rumoured to have published more than five hundred short stories. This list gave me something to aim for, and I began the long and soul-crushing process of sending out short fiction. How eagerly I would come home from the lab in the evening when a short story was out! Hurriedly keying open the mailbox, I would find nothing – a flyer for Papa John’s Pizza with some discount coupons in it, a phone or utilities bill maybe and then, eventually, after weeks of waiting, the self-addressed stamped envelope I had sent with the story, my own name and address in my own hand staring back at me. Inside, a slip, a form rejection. It was at this time that I started talking to Paroma again and started thinking of her as the person who could give me the feedback I needed to improve my writing.
It wasn’t the process I needed to discuss with her. I felt that I already knew the direction to take as far as the technical side of writing was concerned; Steve and David had pointed the way out to me and besides, although Paroma herself was technically proficient, with a distinctive and fresh style, she wasn’t particularly interested in the technical side of things, thinking of it as just an extension of wordplay and often saying things like “Ya, that’s just how it is” when I tried to initiate a discussion on prose with her. But when it came to subject matter and how to approach it, Steve and David were of no use because they knew nothing about South Asian literature and had no interest in it.
South Asian writing was having a moment at the time, with Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize win just around the corner. Having joined some Internet mailing lists that were buzzing with discussions on the ins and outs of this small set of writers who were to be declared the most important writers of the subcontinent by Salman Rusdhie – whose objectivity in this regard could be called into question since the promotion of this group was likely to speed up his own apotheosis – I had developed some strong opinions about what I did or didn’t want to do as a writer.
Most of the big names were writing in a manner that I either found objectionable or boring. I felt that they were either absorbed in the world of the elite or taking aim at the underprivileged from too great a distance. The vast world of the urban middle class was unexplored, and I had begun exploring it in my stories, partly because I didn’t know any other world and didn’t have the chutzpah to pretend I did, and partly because I had the sense that this urban middle class was somehow unmoored from its past, the way I myself was unmoored from the world of my forefathers, and that this meant that it would develop in unpredictable ways and take India itself down unpredictable roads. Or maybe with the benefit of hindsight I am ascribing more foresight to myself than I actually had at the time. Maybe I just wanted to write about my own world and, by doing so, escape it by becoming a famous writer. But it would need a lot of thinking and reading. My ideas needed to be tried out in discussion with someone who could pose credible challenges to them. I now realize that I decided subconsciously to place this burden on Paroma.
Excerpted with permission from Unknown City: A Novel, Amitabha Bagchi, HarperCollins India.
