Often, I’m asked why I write.

And I’m never quite sure how to answer. I’m tired of dull hackneyed phrases about “expressing oneself”, “reimagining the world”, or “telling the stories only I can tell”. Lines repeated so often, at interviews and readings and literary festivals, that they’re emptied and bereft of meaning.

Sometimes, I say I write because I’m not really skilled at anything else.

Or at least none of the other “arts”.

I cannot paint. Even though I try, and I enjoy it — the silent company of brush, paint, water — I’m no artist. My pelicans have been ruminatingly called “slightly daft looking birds”, and someone asked, in all earnestness, if my (recent) seascape acrylic of Santorini was a “school project I was particularly attached to.”

It’s the same with dancing. Apart from some basic Bharatanatyam in kindergarten, I remain pristinely untrained in any dance form, classical or otherwise. Now, I fear, it might be slightly too late to make a career out of it, so I will keep to jiving with my father, and stealthily skittering across the floor at the odd “dance party”. Something tells me, though, given my tacit aversion to most forms of rigorous physical exertion (which also explains my compliant absence in any field of sporting activity), that I may not have quite made the graceful leap to prima ballerina even if I’d tried.

Admittedly, I might be slightly better at dramatics.

Through school and college, and even after, I played a role here and there, Cecily in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest , Cynthia in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound , Laura Lee in Ted Mosel’s Impromptu , and a few others in original works by the theatre troupes I was part of in Delhi. But with writing and working, theatre fell behind, and I doubt I have the admirably singular devotion shown by my (far more talented) thespian friends for auditions, rehearsals, workshops.

Musically, there’s more promise. My family, immediate and extended, is peppered with singers and musicians. My maternal grandmother, whose strong soprano voice filled the churches of my childhood, would make recordings at All India Radio. An aunt or two are splendid at the piano, forming the centre of raucously tipsy clusters at parties, lustily belting out “Oh when the saints go marchin’ in”. Most of my uncles play guitar. A couple are skilled classical musicians, a few boast past membership in short-and not-so-short-lived bands. My father usually carts his guitar to evening gatherings around Shillong, a happily dedicated wandering minstrel. My musical aspirations, however, have repeatedly been thwarted. I began learning the piano, weekend lessons at Kong Mabel’s home, but then was packed off to a newly opened boarding school with empty music rooms. Any attempts at playing guitar fizzled after college. Recently, though, I’ve acquired a jubilantly purple acoustic instrument, on which I haltingly strum Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’. (It’s almost 10 minutes long, and I figure that’s the equivalent of learning three songs.) I find it physically strenuous in a way completely different to writing: my shoulders ache, and my fingertips are tender, waiting to turn calloused. Sometimes, the joy of playing a verse correctly is equivalent to writing a few lines I don’t entirely loathe.

Yet would music ever take the place of writing?

I think not.

So, why then do I write?

Perhaps key to understanding this is realising the answer will constantly change. Or that it is often many reasons all at once. I write because it’s entertaining. Because death scares me and I wish to leave something tangible behind. I want to be known. I write because I read. I write to see my name in print. And my words on paper. I write because I’d like to win prizes. Because I don’t care about prizes. Because stories stick in my head like limpets. Because there is a restlessness in what some people call the soul. Because I like bookshops. I like seeing my books in a bookshop. Because friends sometimes send pictures of my books that they spot in faraway bookshops. Writing, in the parlance of our times, is cool. It is also the only way I know how to register protest. Because it is a form of memory. So I will remember. So I will forget. Because I have loved and lost. And loved, against all hope, against all reason, again. I write to hold on. To let go. I write because I like being alone. Because language thrills me. And fails me. I write because my grandfather was a poet. To make my parents proud. Because my childhood was filled with aloneness and books. Because I like to listen. Because it is a form of empathy. Because there’s wine at book launches. I write because nothing else brings me as much joy. Or exasperation. Because I like music, and there is music in words. When I’m asked why I write, there is no time for all this. So I sometimes say that which is most convenient, and constant, if not truest. Because I can’t not.

Janice Pariat is the author of Seahorse; @janicepariat

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