Courtesy: The Hindu
Ajeet Cour
W
hy do I write ?
I write because I love writing. Period.
But such single-word, one-line answers don’t suffice when you are face to face with an intellectual audience.
So what else do I say ?
I ask my friends, those who belong to the fraternity of writers. Khushwant Singh says, “I write because writing brings me money and notoriety. Moreover, I feel elated when beautiful girls ask for my autographs”. A well-known Punjabi poet Amrita Pritam says “In my last birth I was a ‘rishi’, meditating somewhere in the snow-covered solitude of Himalayas. Another ‘rishi’ cursed me that in my next birth I will suffer great pain, and paint that pain in words. So I was born with a pen in my hand”. Another writer says, “Well, because I don’t know how to do anything else”.
Why do I write ? I wonder ! And then I look in those secret spaces within me, into those mysterious depths where innumerable galaxies dance in the eternal darkness, where innumerable deaths coexist with innumerable lives, where all the bygone centuries and all the experiences human life has passed through sleep in an ever-awakening awareness, where I find an enormous kaleidoscope in which my own experiences and the vision through which I have lived and seen this world, the reality or its fringe that I have been able to touch, all the horizons which I have been endeavouring to reach and go beyond, all the elusive pasts and elusive presents and futures clad in mystery, all the awe-inspiring knowledge and fearsome ambiguity, all the truths tugging at each other, all loves and hates, a whole universe which is my private universe, living and throbbing across the abyss in my conscious and sub- conscious being, inside that mysterious kaleidoscope, manifesting itself in myriad colours and getting magnified.
I write because that is the only way I know of grappling with the various contradictory truths which keep tugging at each other. I write because I constantly try to unravel the great mystery that life is. I write because I try to reconstruct life and interpret it in terms which are more persuasive than reality.
I write because in the process I not only try to fathom the fathomless depths of human reality of the mindscapes of my characters, I also try to grapple with the multitudes I carry within. Because none of us is a single individual, we are people within people, whose longings and yearnings and thoughts are in constant conflict with each other. From this constant contact with the welding torch of our individual and collective realities, fly the sparks I endeavour to capture in my writings.
But my only tools are words and most of the time they prove insufficient, ineffective. Like a fisherwoman I keep the net spread wide in ever-flowing waters, trying to capture the fish whose skins glow with myriad colours of the sun-rays transformed when they pierce the crystal of flowing waters. But when I catch them in my hand, they gasp and die. Their colours fade away. I turn them upside down. Their dead bellies are the colour of ash-grey sky.
In this age and times of monstrous savagery humans continue to display in their dealings with their fellow beings, I have no other weapons of protest than my words.
I write because, whether I am capable of exploring and using its vitality or not, I know the power of the word, and I love its resonance, its tinkle, its various shades of meaning, its eternal and inherent truth, its texture, its sound, its rhythm. Words which glow with the colours of dawns and dusks, words which fall like the first rain-drop on parched earth, words which roar like cyclones and have the thunder of black clouds, words which flash across my mind’s horizon like lightening, words which are soft and pulsating, words which have the resonance of metal striking against metal, words which purr and words which roar ! I am in love with words. That is perhaps why I write. To explore their hidden pulse and temperament, I play with them I chisel them, I also chase them when they are elusive and mysterious. It is the process of discovering something which is larger than myself. It is the manifestation of elusive, undiscovered, unfathomable reality. I write to encounter and concretise my own thoughts, and sometimes perhaps a face seen long ago, a dusk descending slowly around me, the subtle footsteps of stars heard in mysterious childhood, an anguish encountered long back, rustle of leaves in the stillness of night, and sometimes the urgent, constant knocking on my consciousness of mysterious visions, ideas, dreams, and perhaps the presumptuous belief of rebuilding the world.
I write because I am a witness to the horrors of daily life, day-to-day existence of people living next door, or in Punjab or Kashmir or Assam, or in Bosnia or Chechnya or Rawanda, or anywhere else in the world, feeling my destiny entwined with theirs, living in fear, dying like flies. And I can’t look the other way. I write because I believe that those who remain silent become a part of the dark conspiracy.
I write because that is the only way I know of defining my own identity, and registering my protest against all that is wrong.
I write because the miracle of finding, chiselling, breaking and moulding words to capture those fleeting moments of life which fascinated me, or awed me, or terrified me, or held me spell-bound, or broke me into a million miniscule pieces, fascinates me.
It is also a challenge I can’t ignore or avoid, because I chose to accept it. I write because I am a tiny particle of life on this planet, which is again a tiny particle in the great cosmos^ and I want to fight and conquer my sense of futility of being the tiniest of the tiny particles in this vast pulsating universe. It is perhaps the only way I know of asserting myself, or discovering myself and the great mysteries of human life around me.
Also, because the ability to think is the most dynamic and significant force in the living world, and literature is the most thoughtful combination of form and meaning.
I enjoy writing even though it involves the great anguish of feeling myself on trial every single minute of my life. And it needs great courage to speak in the darkest hour, and speak the truth.
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Notes
The Beacon would like to thank Ajeet Cour, Arpana Caur and Alok Bhalla for making available this text.
Ajeet Cour born 1934 writes fiction, short stories and novels in Punjabi and was the recipient of the Sahitya Akademi award in 1985 and the Padma Shri in 2006 apart from a clutch of other literary awards. Ajeet Cour in The Beacon “Dead-End”: Short fiction by Ajeet Cour Women Writers! The Bell Tolls for You and Me
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