[This column gathers fragments I shared through August and September—notes from Kashi in progress, meditations on language, editing, memory, and literature. They came daily, like scattered pebbles; together they form a diary of two months’ writing and reflection.]

A LANGUAGE WITHOUT ITS LOCAL WORDS IS LIKE FOOD WITHOUT SALT

Today in Kashi —my fiction in process, I found myself thinking about words that don’t bend easily into English—dal paratha, aloo ki bhujia, even the sound of chup-chup. I can translate, but translation drains their smell, their grease, their intimacy. Flatbread stuffed with lentils is not dal paratha.

When these words slip into English lines, they carry memory more than meaning. They not only remind me of the pulse of the tongue I was born with, but also protect the fiction from becoming sterile. For me, every true novel must carry its own mix of languages, even if only in tiny whispers.

A language without its local words is like food without salt.

EVERY TRUE BOOK IS LESS WRITTEN THAN REVEALED

Watching the moon above the fleeting landscape, I was reminded how often we mistake illusion for truth, and truth for illusion. Sometimes the largest illusion becomes the deepest truth.

Reading Jane Eyre, I could feel the centuries vibrating with her revolting screech. Yet the thought that lingers with me is quieter: the soul has no sex, no genre. Whatever rises from that depth will belong to its shape.

Perhaps literature’s task is not to obey the borders of genre, but to listen to what comes from within, even if it dissolves categories on its way.

Every true book is less written than revealed.

EDITING IS NOT ERASING, IT IS CHOOSING THE RIGHT CHAOS

—Yesterday I wrote my fiction, today I edited. The page was raw, alive but scratched on the surface. I touched only lightly—an article restored, a run-on given space, one echo trimmed—and the words suddenly looked deliberate. The chaos stayed, but now it felt like chosen chaos.
—I think of Faulkner’s notebooks, messy and crowded; of Woolf scattering her lines; of Kafka knotting sentences like vines. What the world later read was not different fire, but the same fire polished by a hand that sanded, not extinguished. Writing does not always ask for reinvention. Often it asks only for a tilt—one word in place, one pause at the right spot, a silence sharpened. That is enough.

DARWINIAN IN LITERATURE

Literature is Darwinian.Prizes, critics, noise — they rise like froth, then vanish. What lasts is tested by time. Rushdie had his Midnight’s Children, Naipaul his A house for Mr. Biswas. The rest, though applauded at their birth, live in dim corridors. Posterity is severe; it keeps only what still breathes when fashions rot, what still shakes a reader after decades.

So each “comeback,” each “Booker longlist” is only a glitter. The true judge is time. It will tell who stands, who falls. Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny too must walk through this Darwinian fire.

ONONOMATOPOEIA, RUSTIC ECHOES, AND GUY DE MAUPASSANT’S A NORMANDY JOKE

In today’s work in process fiction KASHI, a word slipped in by itself, without my conscious effort. A reed creaked—krrr, krrr—the basket hushed, laid on the ground, mangled. I realised later it was onomatopoeia—words imitating the sound of things. I like to use rustic onomatopoeia; perhaps I did not put them there—they came with the breath of the scene. I prepared a chart of onomatopoeic words, used in the colloquial rustic Indian background, for my own dictionary.

—Later I read Maupassant’s A Normandy Joke. The four feelings of merriment, humour, apprehension, and cruelty—all came like four wavelengths in a small plot: muffled laughter, whispers buzzing, and suddenly the gunshot bang cutting through the night. For a moment the bride’s heart trembled, and with her, the reader’s. A whole mood changed with one noise. The bride’s fear swelled the reader’s heart.
That is the double gift of sound in prose: it anchors realism, and it stirs apprehension. Maupassant knew how to let words carry not only meaning, but also the echo of the world. And perhaps I am learning, in my own slow way, to let my lines breathe the same.
Quotation from the story — A Normandy Joke:
‘The bride turned pale; her heart beat quickly, for he had not returned.’

MEMORY, SILENCE, AND HER LOVER

—Worked on my novel KASHI today, a fragment where memory and silence circle around the courtyard, father and relics.

—For a long time I thought Maxim Gorky was a pure realist. I was enamored by his autobiographical trilogy—‘My Childhood’ came first in my house, won by my father as a school prize; ‘In the World’ was brought home by my late brother; and ‘My Universities’ I myself bought.

Today, I read his short story HER LOVER. It felt 90 % psychological, only 10 % realism. Written before SigmundFreud, yet carrying the same knack for inner nuance. Somewhere, Gorky drifts into the same realm Dostoevsky anchored at least in this story, I can’t comment on his whole stories as I haven’t read them in bulk.

“Do you think Gorky was more psychological than realist?”

WHAT I SAW IN MY MUHALLA, GORKY SAW AT CHEKHOV’S FUNERAL

After reading Maxim Gorky’s account of Chekhov’s funeral, I felt that the human being, in the collective form, presents itself as the most heinous of creatures. What is sacred to the individual—the loss of a husband, a brother, a son—becomes in the crowd nothing but entertainment.

The same truth struck me in my own memory. When a woman came wailing in the tonga after hearing the news of her son’s drowning, the muhalla people were already waiting in excitement. Their eyes were not softened by her grief, but sharpened by curiosity.

📖 From Gorky’s letter to his wife, describing Anton Chekhov’s funeral:

“I am so depressed by this funeral … as if I were smeared with sticky, foul-smelling filth … Anton, who squirmed at anything vile and vulgar, was brought in a car ‘for transporting fresh oysters’ and buried next to the grave of a Cossack widow called Olga Kukaretkina … People climbed trees and laughed, broke crosses and swore as they fought for a place. They asked loudly, ‘Which is the wife? And the sister? Look, they’re crying … You know he hasn’t left them a penny, Marx gets the lot … Poor Knipper … Don’t worry about her, she gets 10,000 a year in the theatre,’ and so on. Chaliapin burst into tears and cursed: ‘And he lived for these bastards, he worked, taught, argued for them.’”

GENRE IS SHADOW OF COMMERCE FALLING ACROSS THE PAGE

Genres are shelves, not souls. They belong to markets and bookshops, not to the act of writing itself. When words come from consciousness, from that pulse which lies deeper than thought, they carry no label. Break Kafka’s prose into lines and it becomes poetry; stretch Woolf’s verse back into paragraphs and it becomes story again. The soul writes without form. It releases rhythm. We are the ones who later name it “novel,” “poem,” or “diary.” Perhaps genre is only the shadow of commerce falling across the page.

Magical Strikes✍️✍️✍️

It has the quality of an unbidden arrival — the way Kafka described sentences coming to him “like a gift from the night.” The suddenness of such moments — pen in hand, and the line spilling out — reveals that they come from a deeper layer of the subconscious, not from deliberate planning.
That is why the sentences feel sharp, razor-like, balanced amid the storm, and memorable, slicing through time. They carry rhythm, contrast, and philosophical weight — qualities usually achieved only after repeated revisions. But magical strikes don’t need that; when they arrive, they become the anchor of a chapter, sometimes even of the whole book.
I call it magical strikes — that rare instant when the inner self and the voice of literature coincide.

WHERE ELIOT SAW THE END, I SEE THE CYCLE

It is worth pausing on a paradox. I am sharing a slice from my forthcoming column. T. S. Eliot was not an atheist, and after his conversion he wrote Four Quartets, a deep meditation on eternity and time, and the soul’s standstill niche in the ever-turning, shifting world. Yet despite a stoic-like belief, he lamented in The Waste Land and often imagined history as exhausted, civilization as collapsed. Eliot’s belief in eternity stood in contrast to his vision of culture—fragile and makeshift. In his view, the soul might survive, but the world was destined to end “not with a bang but a whimper.”
Here I take a different view. What appeared to be an end for Eliot is, to me, only a shadow on the eternal wheel. Civilizations rise and fall, but the soul’s infinity does not end. What is a fragment for one age becomes a fertile seed for the next. Waste is never waste—it is compost for renewal.

BREAKING LIMITS AND REACH

—Today I wrote very little, only edited yesterday’s lines. David Thane Cornell once told me that I break all limits of language. If it is true, it still feels astonishing to me — almost like over-praise. English is my academic second language, and yet whatever I do in it happens inherently, without calculation. Perhaps that is my way of writing: to move inside the frame, then quietly dissolve it.✍️✍️✍️

—Later I read more, memories of Khushwant Singh. His column was a rare bridge — its readers ranged from butchers to professors. That reach itself is a lesson: when words are true, they carry their own democracy. Khushwant Singh wrote with such an appetising clarity — as V. S. Naipaul once said, and I cannot help but agree.

—And today being Anant Chaturdashi, I felt a quiet spiritual undercurrent — a reminder that writing, too, is a kind of offering.🙏🙏🙏🙏

[As August and September fold back into themselves, these fragments remind me that writing is never a finished shape, only a series of arrivals. What seems scattered in the day gathers meaning in time. Perhaps that is what a column is—memory stitched with language, waiting for its next turn.]