Call Me Writer
I strung writing along for a while before I made it official.
It began with a young flautist dancing on the head of a serpent. That was the cover of an old comic book I found in my attic one summer. It was an Amar Chitra Katha—an Indian educational comic book. I tore through the book, which turned out to be about the god Krishna. And then I read others, learning about the rest of the Hindu pantheon. My mom grinned when I found her stash of comics from childhood. It was an easy way to culture me. A sort of Hindu Sunday School. But I took away something more. Something about these words kept me captive.
When I first read the Warriors series, my cousins and I playacted as feral cats. When Narnia first appeared on my bookshelf, we were the Pevensies. I found my sense of humor when I stumbled across my father’s Jeeves and Wooster novels, which I undoubtedly did not understand.
But even then, I was presumptuous. So I went from living in other worlds to trying to create one myself.
The first thing I ever remember writing was a play called “Does Third Grade Last Forever?” My third-grade teacher had me mount this production with my classmates and invited all our parents to watch. What a rush! My jokes made people laugh! My dramatic reveals made people gasp! They were just being polite, but I had caught a bug.
By middle school, I had transitioned to the camera. My eighth-grade teacher was a former film editor. Taking her help, I learned the subtleties of the medium. Every time I got an assignment in history or English, I traded in the option of cranking out a quick five-paragraph essay for a multi-weekend film shoot about the topic. A war epic about the Assyrian war chariot. A modern adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, complete with crude visual effects. By high school, I made short films to be aired on our local community access television channel. I took part in film festivals. In short, I felt like an artist.
Then I went to college. Being an artist was now a waste of time, with immigrant parents paying for my expensive schooling. No more hobbies! Now was when life became serious. I aced college and went to law school. I loved it there! Then came the pandemic, filled with the unimaginable. Family members suffering, isolation, and economic uncertainty. Nothing could be relied upon. Not even old saws about starving artists. Perhaps I should tend to my neglected creative needs after all.
This time, I turned to novels. I formed a weekly writing group. After all these years, this is when I finally called myself a writer. Because of these new friends. They found time every week to proudly and irresponsibly retreat from the clatter of modern life, take refuge from temporal concerns, and, with other writers of all types, play. What fools.
Count me as one of them.
