When Cheryl Strayed sits down to write, she says she aspires to greatness but renders to mediocrity. I return to this piece of wisdom often. In essence, her advice is about pushing through that first wave of anxiety when you write and creating from a place of humility and forgiveness. Only, I find now, my ideas of both greatness and mediocrity differ in some way from Cheryl’s. I write in English in India.

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I’ve had a lot of jobs and I’ve done a lot of writing; the desk at a local newspaper, magazines, student papers, progress reports, research projects, emails, chirrupy promotional literature for software companies, start-ups and local real estate companies.

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I’ve blogged. I’ve reviewed. I’ve entered contests. I write. Words have paid my bills, become my strongest marketable skill, sustained me. I thrill at the hunt for just the right word; I play with turns of phrases; I love how annotation can become a thing birthed but separate from the original text; I love striking the right tone; fussing over punctuation; contracting an unwieldy sentence or breathing life into an unformed one. These things bring me endless joy. I revel in the English language and its possibilities and it has loved me back –– For the most part.

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Often, my love of the language hovers just out of reach. I am at once, stilted, wooden, unoriginal. This happens most when I write personal nonfiction or creative fiction. The flustering in my mind convinces me that there is no one more stupid than I am. I am mediocre. The truth is, the English I write professionally is divorced from the English I experience. When you write, you bring the self to the page. Often, an editor will instruct you to “make it informative” or “make it funny,” and it’s easy for me to embody that voice, even if I don't necessarily feel it. When I create MY fiction or write about my personal experiences, I often wonder which self I want to inhabit.

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Anandi Mishra sums up this feeling in the brilliant essay Why do I write in my colonizers’ language? She says, “Hindi became the cotton pyjamas I wore at home, while English would be my uniform for school time,”. I want to write meaningful fiction and honest creative nonfiction. But you can’t write with any real honesty and vulnerability in your school uniform! Like Mishra, I too have a complicated relationship with English. However, unlike her, I have never spoken anything else.

 

My great-grandparents would speak Konkani 1 only to each other. Their eight children spoke nothing but the Queen’s English, if you please. My great grandfather, who worked with the Railways in British India, lived in fear of his family speaking English with an accent. He famously carried a dictionary with him everywhere and was in the habit of looking up new words and writing them down. My fathers’ side of the family, who migrated to East Africa two generations ago, wove new social and cultural meanings into the English they spoke and wrote.