What does it mean to lead a writer’s life?

There’s a self-help book on the matter (what isn’t there a self-help book on, one wonders?) that, in its own words, “addresses issues that face writers”. Including writer’s block, rejection, and self-discipline. Apart from that, “established authors offer advice on writers’ conferences, networking, self-promotion, the editorial process and other matters.”

But that is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.

The phrase has stayed with me ever since I read Andrew Motion’s biography of the poet Philip Larkin, a few years ago. It’s titled, as you might have guessed, A Writer’s Life . And it fascinated me. Could there be such a thing? Did it involve vintage Underwood typewriters? Cats. Gallons of coffee made from a rustic Bialetti. A window with a view.

A fireplace. Walls lined with books.

Until last summer, I wasn’t sure.

In fact, shifting across continents, disillusioned with freelance writing, anchorless (quite literally and otherwise), it felt hard enough just to build a life. Any sort of life. I was back in Delhi, the city I had fled in 2009, a city where I’d always felt unable to write (only after moving back to Shillong for a year did I start and finish the stories in Boats on Land ). What would happen now?

I hated it at first.

Defensive, uncertain, I was meticulously guarded. Plotting even how to flee again. A year, that’s what I would give it. Before another sweltering summer came around, I’d try to find an elsewhere. Yet, slowly, the unthinkable happened. I settled. Tentatively. Waiting for something to slip, to drop. But for the first time in a very long while, Delhi felt embracive. The city and I were in accord. I slipped, somehow, into its rhythms — the late evenings, and lazy morns, the rattle and hum of its streets, the (hideously polluted yet) softening air. I found a place to be; rather fittingly a barsati , that most iconic of Delhi’s accommodation offerings for the young and single. A barsati with an overhanging jamun tree that was in flush fruit when I moved in. It felt like a blessing.

My neighbourhood became mine, but not because it was where I was paying rent.

Down the road, I made friends with the fruit seller, whose cart, parked under a tree, changed with the seasons. Close by, through the park, a vegetable stall. One late afternoon, I was walking back home, laden with groceries, and the winter sun had turned the trees gold. For that instant, the world — the children’s swings, the grass, the dusty air — stood still. And I remember saying to myself, remember this. Remember this. At the old neighbourhood market, still flanked by small independent shops, I find a chaat and alu tikki stand. Now, the owner knows I like a tad extra tamarind, lighter on the mint sauce, more papri than dahi bhalla . On some evenings, foil plate and wooden spoon in hand, I sit in the market courtyard, at rare peace. Across the road, I find a good dry cleaners. A stationery store with multitudinous delights. A neighbourhood away, I find a tailor. Who is old world, and gentle, and polite, and calls himself Masterji. I have a bootlegger’s number saved in my phone. And an electrician who appears at the doorstep in a trice. And when things begin to get too comfortable, the city gives me dissent.

Only glimmeringly does it come to me. That this too is a writer’s life. One marked by a particular sense of belonging that translates into a quiet space at my work table. Even if I usually tend to agree with Doris Lessing, who once said, “Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible”, I can see how sometimes what’s also required is steadiness. After all, the orchestra must first take its place before there can be music.

If the city has reached out to me, so have its people. The other evening, I’m introduced to a stranger, a friend’s friend. “You’re Janice? You write…” They tell me they’ve read my first book; they think it’s amazing. I’m thrilled; not in a ‘I’m a celebrity’ kind of way, but that I’ve met someone to whom my book has made its miraculous way. That it has left my hands and landed up in theirs. It is real.

A writer’s life is this, then. Long periods of silence. Of aloneness. Sometimes, of handwritten letters from readers that you cherish. Of noticing seasons. And, in this city, the smell of flowering winter trees. A writer’s life is stark, humdrum discipline. No other way but through the page. Word after word. It is having lovers with homes where you are comfortable enough to write. And, for when life doesn’t allow you feline companions, friends who own cats. A writer’s life, no matter how individually disparate, involves retreat. And always, resurrection.

Janice Pariat is the author of Seahorse; @janicepariat

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