A Requiem for a Song Bird

This is a piece I wrote in a graduate-level public health course in February 2017.


I have been thinking a lot about George Michael recently. He died alone on Christmas Day in his home just outside of London (“George Michael,” 2016). His body is still with the police (“George Michael,” 2017). They determined that he died of heart failure and that it was not suspicious, but they are still conducting additional tests (Reed, 2016). I don’t know what they are looking for, but I have a feeling it may have to do with substance abuse. He was only 53 years old (Pareles, 2016).

My earliest memories are of one of my older brothers dancing and singing in front of the television to George Michael’s Wham! era music videos. This was in the early 1980s when the singer was still a teenager. He went on to become one of the most famous (and stylish!) singers in the world. I genuinely loved his voice and spent many years singing along to his recordings. Since the late 1990s, however, he became known less for his music than for his run-ins with the law. He was arrested for a “lewd act” in a male public bathroom in Beverly Hills in 1998 and subsequently came out as a gay man (Lyttle, 1998). In 2010, he spent four weeks in prison for crashing his car into a shop while under the influence (Swash, 2010). In the decade before his death, he became reclusive and suffered a series of health problems, particularly an episode that resulted in hospitalization and near death (Walker, 2011).

George Michael was one of the most sought-after sex symbols of his generation. He struggled with his sexuality, however, and hid it under a veil of super-charged heterosexuality. He began to seek out sex with strangers while still in his teens (Newman, 2016), and as an adult, wallowed in depression during the AIDS epidemic in which he lost a much-loved secret boyfriend (Moore, 2016). In his words, he suffered from “grief and self-abuse” for most of his life (Newman, 2016).

So I found it interesting to read a 2015 report on the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) website about the incidence of substance abuse and mental illness in sexual minorities (Medley et al, 2015). This was the first time they used sexuality as a variable in examining these issues (“SAMHSA report,” 2016). According to the report (Medley et al, 2015), sexual minorities are more likely than those in the sexual majority to use illicit drugs, smoke cigarettes, and drink alcohol. Further, they are more likely to have substance abuse disorders and mental illnesses, and according to other material on the website, also more likely to experience issues such as heart disease, cancer, and even violence (“Top health issues,” 2012). Given how I feel like I am grieving for George Michael, this hurt.

I was also reminded of a project I am working on with a professor in my department about gay athletes in the United States. The project uses interviews to gather data, and I have heard one elderly gay athlete talk about how some closeted gay men use drugs like amyl nitrate in order to get through having sex with a woman. It’s upsetting – it’s not fair to have to live like that. As if life isn’t difficult enough.

I am currently taking a gender studies course, and I’m learning about the androcentric nature of science and society. Also, in this public health course, we have learned that the way our society is organized is bad for some people’s health (California Newsreel, 2014). With researchers now paying attention to the role of sexuality in health, they may find that our heteronormative institutions have been setting up sexual minorities to die early and to have a poor quality of life until then. I feel that the slides on racism that we saw earlier in the semester could help us understand how that happens (Jones, 2000). SAMHSA even has a dedicated page for LGBT health on its website (“Behavioral Health Equity,” 2016).

George Michael, however, is still dead. That will not change no matter how much I want him to be alive and out in the world somewhere. It hurts, and I’m surprised by how much. I mean, I’m a media scholar, and I understand that people can form bonds with other people in the media, both real and fictitious. That probably happened with me somewhere over the years. My earliest memories of him are of a young, fashionable song bird, and really, all I ever wanted for him was to enjoy his life and be happy, the way I would wish for an older sibling, a cool uncle, or my own child. Maybe the way our society is set up made that impossible for him. Maybe all it could offer someone of his sexual orientation was a path of substance abuse and mental illness. It could have been different. And we will never know.

Rest in peace, dear, dear friend. I’m so sorry that I could not take care of you.

References

Behavioral Health Equity: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) (2016, November 9). Retrieved from https://www.samhsa.gov/behavioral-health-equity/lgbt

California Newsreel. (2014, October 22). UNNATURAL CAUSES – Trailer. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXBkOYMCAro&list=PLayHb3ehfKbfxdMAmIkFm2wlRikR4Ka6f

George Michael: Coroner yet to release singer’s body a month after his death. (2017, January 28). news.com.au. Retrieved from http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/george-michael-coroner-yet-to-release-singers-body-a-month-after-his-death/news-story/c03ca7a2fb727c2e3976c7d481ac90ec

George Michael: Pop superstar dies at 53. (2016, December 26). BBC. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-38432862

Jones, C. (2000). The impacts of racism on health [PowerPoint slides]. Harvard School of Public Health. Retrieved from https://blackboard.sc.edu/courses/1/PUBH700-J50-SPRING-2017/content/_10122663_1/camara%20jones.ppt

Lyttle, J. (1998, April 8). George Michael arrested over `lewd act'. The Independent. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/george-michael-arrested-over-lewd-act-1155246.html

Medley, G., Lipari, R. N., Bose, J., Cribb, D. S., Kroutil, L. A., & McHenry, G. (2016). Sexual orientation and estimates of adult substance use and mental health: Results from the 2015 national survey on drug use and health. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Retrieved from https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUH-SexualOrientation-2015/NSDUH-SexualOrientation-2015/NSDUH-SexualOrientation-2015.pdf

Moore, J. (2016, December 26). GQ. Retrieved from http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/george-michael-interview

Newman, V. (2016, December 26). Sex, drugs and self-destruction: The dark side of George Michael he couldn't fight. Mirror. Retrieved from http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/sex-drugs-self-destruction-dark-9515044

Pareles, J. (December 25, 2016). George Michael, pop superstar, is dead at 53. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/arts/music/george-michael-dead.html?_r=0

Reed, R. (2016, December 30). Autopsy: George Michael's Cause of Death 'Inconclusive'. Rolling Stone. Retrieved from http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/autopsy-george-michaels-cause-of-death-inconclusive-w458442

SAMHSA report shows higher rates of substance use and mental illness among sexual minority adults. (2016, October 11). Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Retrieved from https://www.samhsa.gov/newsroom/press-announcements/201610110100

Swash, R. (2010, July 6). George Michael arrested after crashing car into shop. Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/jul/06/george-michael-arrested

Top health issues for LGBT populations [PowerPoint slides]. (2012). Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Retrieved from http://store.samhsa.gov/shin/content//SMA12-4684/SMA12-4684.ppt

Walker, P. (2011, December 23). George Michael gives tearful account of near-death pneumonia ordeal. Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/23/george-michael-reveals-pneumonia-ordeal

Skinnydipping in the Juice of Life

From my diary, dated May 7, 2012:

"I don't know, everything in my life was so stunted and sad looking these past 10 years. My writing, my art, my website, my relationships. Now it's all exploded with substance and colour and texture. I'm having some sort of creative awakening, and it's so beautiful. I have rainbow light coming out of my eyes and mouth and ears and nostrils. That is exactly what I feel like. It's so beautiful. It's even more beautiful than when I was younger. My website has only had 1 page completed, but the design looks so juicy and yum. It's like a Skittles website. All froot juice. Yum. I am so happy. I feel so free and larger than life. Everything in my life is fruit juice now. You can see it in the way I talk, the look in my eyes, the way I dress, the food I cook, the scented candles I burn. I am living again!! I am creative again!!

I am so full of colour nowadays. I swear to God, past few weeks I've started feeling that the colours I see in my usual world seem richer than usual. It really is quite delicious. I feel like my wiring's changing, like my neurons are connecting into a newer network. It's so wonderful, I feel like I am constantly having my breath taken away by every stimulus. :)"

Muse Speak

From my diary, dated April 9, 2012:

"What's the difference between an inspired idea and my own thoughts? The former come out of nowhere and feel like someone is giving me good advice. My own thoughts are on-purpose, sometimes I'll be forcing myself to think even...

...things are talking to me. My body talks to me in moods and sensations, my inner voice talks to me in a solid voice from a dark hole between my lungs, and now inspiration and insight is talking to me in breezy echo-ey multiple voices around my head. Wow. And I trust this. I trust myself. I trust all these things that talk to me. They have never misguided me. Shit, shit, shit. This is incredible. :o"

Display Pic

Title: 'Like' My FB DP

Method Writer

Newspaper cutting from Muscat about an opera set in ancient Egypt

 

I'm writing a book on ancient Egypt, and while I am not allowed to say much more about it, I want to share that this project is different because it treads a fine line between fiction and non-fiction. It's difficult making a setting come alive when no one's really seen it, and I have found from experience that whenever I have to write about an era gone by, it helps to immerse myself in as much everyday detail about life back when. Seems like I write best when I can shut myself in a room and feel like I'm walking amongst the people I am making up and eating the food they are eating and feeling the fabric they are wearing. When I was a little girl and used to live mostly in my head, I had become a little obssessed with ancient Egypt and had wanted to live there. This was in the time long before the Internet or easy access to books, but I still remember a children's book about ancient Egypt that I had borrowed from the British Council library in Muscat, Oman. I can still see the book open before me to a page where the artist had drawn the picture of an Egyptian home. The artist had also drawn people walking about the mud house - through the door, on the stairs, in the kitchen. I felt like they were my friends, that if I went outside I would run into them. Of course I knew them. These little people made of ink, they had names and hobbies.

I later went and rebuilt the house using a shoebox and used my miniature animal toys to play in it. My favourite was the cat that was of the colour of the chicken curry my mother would make. The cat was always the heroine of all my games, and often another animal would be in love with her, but she would be too alone in her great thoughts and adventures to notice.

These days I feel like I'm living in ancient Egypt again. I've come across similar drawings of houses in all the research I've been doing about that time, and I think I've lived in all of them. Everytime I research this way and after my project has been finished, I carry with me a feeling of fondness for that time, that country, those people lost in the dust. I think of them often like I would of an old lover I once sparkled my eyes at because he smiled at me. It almost makes me cry sometimes.

Life 2012

Title: Compartmentalised

Museum Directions

There was something very creepy about the Parsi-looking man from the Jehangir Art Gallery. I had asked him to tell me where the Prince of Wales museum was, and even though it was down the street, he'd almost leapt to take me there himself.

What a creepy man. He was probably in his mid-30s, light-skinned, stout, clean-shaven, and with no expression at all. He mumbled and stared directly into my eyes the whole time, and about 2 minutes into our awkward walk to the museum where I could feel him looking me up and down and rubbing his hands with silent slimey glee I told him I could get there myself and I very happily left him behind.

A Letter I Just Wrote in 1991

Dear grown-up Khadija,

I am writing to you because you've been trying to find me. I saw you trying really hard over the past few years, and you've come really close, but I think it's my turn to reach out now. I need to cover these last few steps and close the distance between us.

I am you, 10 years old, and from where I am, the year is 1991. Do you remember 1991? It was in the early 90s that you started doing some really cool things. You pestered Abbu into showing you how to work his Yashica SLR camera. You just kept asking and asking and asking until he had to show it to you. You'd go on to win a Middle Eastern photo competition with it. You also started spending hours at the DOS PC at home, the one that only displayed text, that too in green. That's where you learned how to type so fast without needing to look at the keyboard. You spent hours writing all sorts of things on that computer. You wrote two mystery novels based on a character similar to Nancy Drew. You even made pretend book covers for those novels. One was about sabotage at a farm and the other was about the sabotage of a high school music department. You'd even started writing a Nancy Drew novel based in India. You also wrote a collection of short horror stories. There was the one about the guests who died on their way to a party but still showed up. Then then one about the young male student at an English boarding house who was ragged to death and stayed behind to mourn his fate for all eternity. You wrote a commentary on each an every one of your classmates. You wrote an essay on your thoughts about how being educated and being knowledgable seemed to be two different things. You'd go on to use that concept on your TOEFL essay after high school when you had to write down your thoughts about if you preferred education over experience. The staff at the testing center would be really impressed with your scores, they will have never had someone score so highly before. Back at that old DOS PC, you would spend so much time staring at those green letters as you typed all your stories that when you were done, everything white around you would look light pink for a while afterwards. And one day the computer crashed and you lost everything. Everything. All those stories and characters have remained in your life though, like miscarried children.

You would then go on to writing a story on paper and stapling the pages together into a book with a front and back cover. Do you remember the story, it was about 4 children - brothers and sisters - who got lost in a forest and found their way out by following the movement of the sun across the sky. You had even made an ever-growing short story collection by adding pages of short stories (with illustrations!) between two pieces of cardboard covers tied up with ribbon. Do you remember the first story? It was about a girl who lived in the forest on a hill and saw her first human from where she hid in the trees - a boy from the town in the valley. You wrote about how she fell in love with him from a distance and waited for him and then followed him to the valley, only to discover that he loved someone else there. Her heart broke and she returned to the forest on the hill without ever facing the boy she loved.

Around the same time you discovered the magic of recording your own voice on audio tape, and you started spending hours every afternoon, when the grownups would be asleep, at the music system, at first simply recording yourself reading from books like the British women who read stories on Oman radio. Then you graduated to reading from the newspaper the way they also did on the radio. Then you started pretending to be the news anchor and the correspondent and would record your voice as you spoke through the phone intercom to capture the effect of a real phono. Then you started recording music request shows and mixed your own tapes from your own music collection. After a while you'd pester Abbu to show you how to use the giant video camera. You couldn't do much with it, the whole thing was made up of separate pieces of a large camera, a large VCR, and a very heavy light that would get hot very fast. You couldn't even move around too much because the whole thing had to be plugged into a power source. You didn't have many subjects, so you'd record your kittens instead. Do you remember that time you were waiting to capture your two kittens rolling across the living room floor? All your video and audio tapes are still lying around that house you live in in 2012 where you're 31 years old.

This is who you are. You draw, you write, you design, you film, you edit. You are not the robot people forced you to become as an adult, someone who talks about machines with people who themselves are machines. I know people made fun of you, called you weird, abnormal, and even laughed at you in groups. I know that's when you stopped listening to me and started doing things to make people stop laughing at you. But they never stopped. You stopped drawing and writing and creating things, though. Because I went away, because while you paid so much attention to the people outside - people who weren't very smart in the first place - I felt bad that you felt ashamed of me and had to hide me, even apologise for me. You never stood up for me. You thought the others were right. So I went away. Like that girl from the forest on the hill. And you weren't able to create things anymore.

But you came back to find me. I saw you standing up for me. I had been so hurt, but you put yourself through your biggest fears to find me again. You left everybody and everything to find me. You'd almost become me again, but I realised that I needed to return your gesture. If the boy from the valley came back to the forest on the hill and looked everywhere for the girl, she would need to hear his calls and go to him. Otherwise they would never be able to meet. So here I am. Ten years old. I like eating plain cornflakes with dollops of ketchup on it. I doodle faces of women all over the phonebook while talking to my friends over the telephone. I don't know what a landline is because in 1991 we only have regular phones at home. Many of us still have rotary phones, and Abbu recently ordered a wireless telephone from Dubai because they aren't available in Oman yet. That's the phone through whose telecom you recorded your voice as a pretend radio correspondent. Amma hasn't started insisting I start wearing grown-up shalwar suits and cover my legs yet. I don't know about menstruation, I don't seem to notice my hair or my face yet, I like to play with my cat and her kittens. She gives birth every 6 months. I don't watch too much TV because cable hasn't come yet. I have a group of friends at school that I huddle up with every recess to take turns and narrate ghost stories to. And I write stories and draw and record in audio and video. And I'm very good at it. I don't know what the other kids do, but the things I do don't seem like work because it's like breathing. It just happens. Doesn't it to everybody? It seems like it should. But it doesn't. But I don't know that yet. I know you do in 2012.

You're remembering these things again, aren't you? You've been trying to get back to being the way I am right now, so imaginative and productive. But you've been having a hard time becoming productive again. You've got everything back except the effortlessness. You're forcing yourself to be creative and complex. You're trying to be yourself by imitation, by paint-by-numbers. You're trying to become like me as if you and I are different people. You don't have to do that. You don't have to become like me, you just have to let yourself be.

Do you know the one thing that's standing in the way of your recovery? It's that you're so self-conscious. You think too much before creating something. Before you've even started you start wondering about style and structure and metaphor and marketability. You start worrying about what you will do with what you create. Stop it. You don't have to do anything. Why don't you just be the way I am right now, oblivious to the world outside? I don't think about what anyone will think about my work. It's not even work for me, it's just...me. Do you remember how your roughbook in school would fill up with art work and stories and illustrations? Do you remember how one day in 6th grade you wrote a story, almost in passing, about two characters - Ketchup and Hot Sauce - who almost fell into a bowl of water and dissolved away? Their father, a tomato, was furious at their carelessness. You wrote about how he yelled at his children about how they were made of him and his wife, their mother, a container of salt. You'd even drawn a picture of the whole thing. You hadn't planned it. You just saw some pictures in your head of two characters, and you made the rest up as you went along. You didn't think about anything else except how much fun you were having. Why don't you do that now?

You're so much older than I am. You know so much more about the world. I am 10 years old, and I go to school. That's it. You've lived in 4 countries - 3 of them by yourself - and experienced things I don't understand yet or even know exist. Maybe you've grown up too much. You've certainly cried too much. What, you thought I wasn't watching? But I'm here now, and we are one. Come back to simpler things, to cornflakes with ketchup, to simple stories. Forget about the world, come back to 1991, before the Internet, before cable TV, before cell phones, before judgments, before perversion. I don't even know the word 'pervert' until a few years later when a girl in my class tries to explain it to me and I still don't understand. You can sit with me and tell me about all the things that are going to happen in the new century. You can tell me everything. We'll write it all down as simple stories. The world will be tomato fathers and condiment children, nothing more complicated than that. We don't have to save the world or win an Oscar, we don't have anything to prove to anybody. We don't have to be famous, we don't have to win prizes, we don't have to be afraid of what the world will say. You're my hero, and you don't have to be afraid anymore.

From,

Me

PS - does '20th Century Fox' change it's name to '21st Century Fox' in the future?

PPS - am I beautiful as a grown-up? Has anyone fallen in love with me yet?

PPPS - how tall do I end up being?

The Cleric's Worst Nightmare

The end of the world is upon us: people now get fatter during Ramadhan, and Kate Moss is the face of Harper's Bazaar Arabia's Ramadhan special (her naughty bits have been covered quite literally for Heaven's sake).

Omanland



Title: Open for Tourism

La Vida Loca



Title: Living on a Visa

Star Parents

Watch the short film at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSMtNX-hXJ4

Fashion from the Future

This brand doesn't exist yet. I made it up so you're ready for what's coming. Her name is Karishma Sehgal, and she was my roommate in Delhi.

Fabric Living

I had a roommate. Her name was Karishma. She liked fashion. This is who she is.



Title: The Fashion Intern

A Miracle at Mother Teresa's

"I had already helped expose one of the "miracles" connected with the work of this woman. The man who originally made her famous was a distinguished if rather silly British evangelist (later a Catholic) named Malcolm Muggeridge. It was his BBC documentary, Something Beautiful for God, which launched the "Mother Teresa" brand on the world in 1969. The cameraman for this film was a man named Ken Macmillan, who had won high praise for his work on Lord Clark's great art history series, Civilisation. His understanding of colour and lighting was of a high order. Here is the story as Muggeridge told it, in the book that accompanied the film:

[Mother Teresa's] Home for the Dying is dimly lit by small windows high up in the walls, and Ken [Macmillan] was adamant that filming was quite impossible there. We only had one small light with us, and to get the place adequately lighted in the time at our disposal was quite impossible. It was decided that, nonetheless, Ken should have a go, but by way of insurance he took, as well, some film in an outside courtyard where some of the inmates were sitting in the sun. In the processed film, the part taken inside was bathed in a particularly beautiful soft light, whereas the part taken outside was rather dim and confused...I myself am absolutely convinced that the technically unaccountable light is, in fact, the Kindly Light that Cardinal Newman refers to in his well-known exquisite hymn.

He concluded that

This is precisely what miracles are for - to reveal the inner reality of God's outward creation. I am personally persuaded that Ken recorded the first authentic photographic miracle...I fear I talked and wrote about it to the point of tedium.

He was certainly correct in that last sentence: by the time he had finished he had made Mother Teresa into a world-famous figure. My contribution was to check out and put into print the direct verbal testimony of Ken Macmillan, the cameraman himself. Here it is:

During Something Beautiful for God, there was an episode where we were taken to a building that Mother Teresa called the House of the Dying. Peter Chafer, the director, said, "Ah well, it's very dark in here. Do you think we can get something?" And we had just taken delivery at the BBC of some new film made by Kodak, which we hadn't had time to test before we left, so I said to Peter, "Well, we may as well have a go." So we shot it. And when we got back several weeks later, a month or two later, we are sitting in the rushes theater at Ealing Studios and eventually up come the shots of the House of the Dying. And it was surprising. You could see every detail. And I said, "That's amazing. That's extraordinary." And I was going to go on to say, you know, three cheers for Kodak. I didn't get a chance to say that though, because Malcolm, sitting in the front row, spun around and said: "It's divine light! It's Mother Teresa. You'll find that it's divine light, old boy." And three or four days later I found that I was being phoned by journalists from London newspapers who were saying things like: "We hear you've just come back from India with Malcolm Muggeridge and you were the witness of a miracle."

"

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'

What Happened to Eduard

"Eduard sat for long hours staring up at the sky in Brasilia, watching the clouds moving across the blue - beautiful clouds, but without a drop of rain in them to moisten the dry earth of the central Brazilian plateau. He was as empty as they were.

If he continued as he was, his mother would fade away with grief, his father would lose all enthusiasm for his career,  and both would blame each other for failing in the upbringing of their beloved son. If he gave up his painting, the visions of Paradise would never see the light of day, and nothing else in this world could ever give him the same feelings of joy and pleasure.

He looked around him, he saw his paintings, he remembered the love and meaning he had put into each brushstroke, and he found every one of his paintings mediocre. He was a fraud, he wanted something for which he had not been chosen, and the price of which was his parents' disappointment.

Visions of Paradise were for the chosen few, who appeared in books as heroes and martyrs of the faith in which they believed, people who knew from childhood what the world wanted of them; the so-called facts in that first book he had read were the inventions of a storyteller.

At supper time, he told his parents that they were right; it was just a youthful dream; his enthusiasm for painting had passed. His parents were pleased, his mother wept with joy and embraced her son, and everything went back to normal.

That night, the ambassador secretly commemorated his victory by opening a bottle of champage which he drank alone. When he went to bed, his wife - for the first time in many months - was already sleeping peacefully.

The following day, they found Eduard's room in confusion, the paintings slashed and the boy sitting in a corner, gazing up at the sky. His mother embraced him, told him how much she loved him, but Eduard didn't respond.

He wanted nothing more to do with love, he was fed up with the whole business. He had thought that he could just give up and follow his father's advice, but he had advanced too far in his work; he had crossed the abyss that separates a man from his dream and now there was no going back.

He couldn't go forwards or back. It was easier just to leave the stage."

- Paolo Coelho, 'Veronika Decides To Die'

My Rorschach

I have recently discovered the unexpected satisfaction that comes from cutting up boring magazines and other things and making something out of nothing. Fellow blogger and poetic prodigy Priyanka Sacheti inspired me to do it. I feel so proud of myself that it's a little bit silly. I don't think I ever felt this sense of achievement after either of my university degrees even. I think I shall make this cut-n-paste thing into a habit. It's even more fun in groups. Therapeutic like. Do you craft?

Title: Stickiness

Capital Crimes

If my stint in Delhi were to be made into a movie...

Shot Ready Hai, Madamji

I only learned the basics of Photoshop a month ago, but look what I can do:


Left: untouched photo. Right: hey, that's how I (wished I) looked like 10 years ago!

 And that's not all...

I would say that I seem to be a natural at this, but somehow that sounds like an oxymoron.

Caricaturing Yourself: A Do-It-Yourself Guide

You know, I used to be able to write. It wasn't an effort at all, it was just how I was. Some people laugh when they are tickled, some cry at the movies, and I used to write. Didn't everybody? I still can't understand why some people say that they can't write. I mean, people can talk, can't they? I used to hear my own voice in my head, speaking my thoughts out loud in my head, and all I used to do was transcribe it, put it down on paper. Didn't everybody do that? What's so difficult about it? One day in high school I felt a rhythm beating inside me, so I wrote a poem along to that rhythm about all my friends to whom I had given Star Trek nicknames. English class was the most fun, it was so easy. You want to know what I did on my summer vacation? I'll tell you about how I ran throughout the house like a delivery girl helping my parents pack. About the person I love the most? I wrote an essay in primary school about my favourite uncle - a young man - who had left Oman for Canada - almost like exile in the 80s - and how he'd recently had heart surgery, so I wanted everyone to pray for him because I loved him so much. He used to take me out for joyrides in his black car when everyone else had just about had it with my 5-year-old self. He'd buy me red nailpolish and chips and play disco music in his car. My father had asked the teacher to let him keep my test paper with him for an extra day so he could make copies of my essay and sent it to my uncle in Canada and to my grandfather in Lucknow. I'd seen my grandfather whimpering when he read the part about my wanting everyone to pray for my uncle - his youngest son - in a country that was too far away for all of us then.

English class was so easy, even the non-creative part of it, like the letter writing and the reading comprehension questions, because I'd hear the answers in my head except rearranged in a better more smart-alecy way from the usual way we were taught to answer. All I had to do was write down what I was hearing. Sometimes I'd see the words in my head - big, black, with sharp edges, like stone-and-mirror buildings. Didn't everybody? Sometimes I'd think of a cool scenario and wonder how it would pan out. So I'd write that out as a story and see where it took me. I once wrote an essay on the spot with other contestants about the state of India on the 50th year of her independence. I just wrote out whatever my family used to discuss at home all the time, and I won - third place. I had just gone out there and written down my thoughts on the matter. I didn't give it a second thought. And I'd won. I hadn't even prepared or practiced or read a bunch on that topic before going. I know the other kids had been coached by their parents and teachers and did not really care about the topic anyway. I'd just gone and put down my thoughts and left the testing room. That had been prize-worthy? But it had not been an effort at all. Wasn't it supposed to be? Writing for me was like how some people sweat when they're warm, it just happens. Doesn't it for everybody? I wasn't doing the writing for anybody else. I was always laughing and amusing myself with it, and I didn't understand why anybody would call it talent. I mean, everyone took English class, right? We had all learned how to write essays and letters and telegrams, right? I did my assignments like everybody else. It was fun because it felt like a game. Talk, they'd say, and I'd speak. I had something to say, so I'd say my piece and be done with it. I'd never look back, the way I wouldn't go back to discuss a test paper. Why would anybody want to go back and dissect things that way? There was no great design to it, no great strategy that made it work, it just happened like a flash of temper, a cloudburst, and it was gone. Whoever went back to judge the mechanics of rain so that that exact storm could be reproduced exactly that way? Why would anyone want to? I had talent, they used to say. I don't know why they would say that. It didn't feel like talent. I didn't like it when they would call it talent. It made me feel like I was obligated to repeat my performances, the ones that worked, and abandon the ones that didn't stir applause. Cut-and-paste myself onto my own self. Cut out parts of myself. Replicate the best thunderstorms, light by light, thunder by thunder, like a carefully coordinated Pink Floyd concert.

Somewhere along the way I became self-conscious. I had talent, I had been told so many times, so that meant that I was supposed to become a 'writer'. What is that? I'd been writing since kindergarten, and I'd first been published at the age of 7. I'd first been paid for writing at 9. But I wasn't a writer yet. Real writers write books, so I promised myself to have a book published by 24. I made that promise to myself one night sitting in my dorm room alone in America. I had been young, not older than 22. It felt like it should be a novel, that's what the Bronte sisters and Charles Dickens and all those other English writers that Indian students are raised on had written. I started a novel on my old PC in my dorm room - it was supposed to be a post-apolcalyptic futuristic adventure story of human rediscovery, it was supposed to be work that would give the world insight into the human condition, but I just could not get past the wall after the first few pages. I felt so ashamed. I had no talent at all.

In the real world, in America, I discovered that real writers got published by the big magazines. I started small. I turned a few stories in to a magazine that was run by the English department at my university. I had written those stories in the style of an up-and-coming genre in the Western world in those days - English-speaking South Asian writers. That's what I was, so I wrote like that. The magazine never called me back. But I had always been told that I had talent. Maybe I didn't really. My grand gestures of genius shattered in the brittle breeze of anonymity. I felt so ashamed. I was 19 or 20. I stopped writing around that time, mostly because I had nothing to say anymore. My technical education was making me so right-brained, I had to worry about life and death and immigration and God and terrorism, I was so tired, and I didn't want to embarass myself anymore. I had no talent, but I wouldn't tell anyone that. I would just not say anything at all. I was trying to be a writer but I couldn't do it. There was nothing in my mind anymore, no running dialogue, the Oracle had stopped speaking. Without it I was useless. I had nothing to transcribe anymore. So it had never really been me that was talented.

Around the time I stopped writing, I also stopped speaking. Stopped speaking my mind, stopped taking a stand. I didn't know who I was in this new country, I hated what I was studying at university. I tried to sound like all the engineers but I couldn't. It was such an unnatural forced way of being. Who talks like that anyway? People usually talk about what they feel, and everyone around me was always talking about binary code and learning the languages of machines. I tried to talk like that, but I couldn't. I had failed at writing, and I was failing as a technical person, despite all the money that my family was spending on me - and reminding me about - on my university education. I used to be good at everything once upon a time, and I had vague memories of never feeling this pressure inside me to just become what people wanted me to be. Everyone else seemed to be doing it fine, becoming whatever their degrees were teaching them to become. Then why was I having such difficulty blending in? I had been trying so hard too. So there had to be something wrong with me, I couldn't seem to do anything right. I wouldn't tell anyone that, though. I just kept going, smiled harder, and people thought I was doing so well. I tried so hard because I didn't want to fail at this too. The only writing I did in those days were emails and university papers. I used a lot of 'therefore', 'herein', 'in fact', 'as follows' in my writing. My emails were quite long, and people used to tell me that my capitalisations and and grammar was always perfect, that one could tell that that email had come from me. I heard from people that my emails were always so much fun to read, that they were like stories, but I was no writer. I could never be like Ghalib or Jhumpa Lahiri. It hurt sometimes so I tried to not think about it. But it would come to me late at night when I'd be trying to sleep.

Once I started my fulltime IT job, I joined a writing club and attended a number of meetings and conferences where I heard speakers - poets, published novelists, editors, agents - talk about mindmapping, character development, paragraph structure, punctuation, character archetypes, manuscript formatting, cover letters, niche markets, genres, submissions, pitches. I wanted to learn how to write because I obviously didn't know how to. I wanted to learn from the people who had done it. I had to compensate for my lack of talent. I even subscribed to Writer's magazine. There was so much I didn't know - dangling modifiers, misplaced phrases. I felt even worse. I had never known any of these things when people used to say that I had talent, when I had been published before. I must've been really green. I felt so ashamed of myself. So I tried to learn as much as I could from as many people in the business. I learned about the 3-act structure, about opening with a hook, I learned about active versus passive voice, I learned about opening a book with action. I knew all these things now. And you know what? I still couldn't write that big amazing book that would make me a writer. I wrote a non-fiction book about being a Muslim and sent a cover letter, synopsis, and sample chapters to over 100 publishers in the US, and most did not respond. A handful wanted to see the rest of the book, but turned me down after. One publisher who'd wanted so badly to see my work started avoiding me later and then told me angrily that my writing had put him to sleep. I had been surprised at how rude he had been, considering how he had been pursing me himself. Another editor was really nice to me, and though he didn't buy my book, he told me that he had liked my voice.

My voice, my voice. It had stopped speaking to me.

But I liked the aspect of hanging around other writers. They used to talk about hearing voices all the time, even the ones who had written 50 novels. Fifty novels! Ten even! I couldn't even write one. I couldn't write anything. I was not a writer, just someone whose grammer and punctuation was clean. I wrote 4 books for a US publisher later, my first book coming out on my 28th birthday. My publisher said that I was the best writer they had ever seen, and that their staff would take first dibs on assignments that involved working with me. They said that they never had to make any major changes to my manuscripts. I had a couple of stories appear in two major US magazines that were founded by Norman Vincent Peale. I even dropped by their office and met their staff in New York City, right across from the Empire State Building. I got a couple of fan emails because of the stuff I wrote. But it was all non-fiction. I was not a writer. I had half a dozen stories and a novel, all unpublished or abandoned in the early stages, sitting in my computer. But I lost count of the number of people who'd told me that I should never stop writing. But writing what? I couldn't write anything. I had evidence in my PC. The pressure inside me was growing, so I gave in and started a blog. For myself, for my sanity. I used to write a personal diary when I was a little kid in school, but I'd lost the habit once I'd started university. I picked that habit back up after I read about Anne Frank in a book about influential women in history. Her writing sounded like mine.

Nobody was more shocked than I when my writing assignments were praised at the NDTV media institute in Delhi. Praised a lot. By people I thought were smart. But it didn't add up. I'd given up trying to sound talented by then. I'd been blogging and writing my diary for a few years, and our writing assignments were supposed to be personal reflections, so I would just write on. It frightened me and disturbed me when I was appreciated. I had no talent, I wasn't even using big words or thinking too much about something great to say. It was upsetting. It was confusing. I wasn't sure if I was being mocked. It frightened me. It was cruel. I hated being introduced as the 'trained writer'. I hadn't even figured out how to be a writer, let alone a trained one. I don't think there is any such thing. I had no talent at all. I knew so many people who had written so many novels, they'd churn them out the way my mother makes rotis. Punch, whack, slap, fire, and roti. Punch, whack, slap, fire, and roti. Punch, whack, slap, fire, and roti. They were the writers, not I.

But now I can't stop writing, I have so many diaries full of words, I can't stop reading, I can't stop writing. None of it is about the human condition. It's just about me and what I see. I don't know how other people feel. I don't know how someone in post-apocalyptic France would feel. I just don't care about being talented anymore. It's tiring trying to become Salman Rushdie. It's tiring trying to be fascinating. No one's writing a book about me or making a movie based on my life. I'm not famous, and I don't have famous friends. I don't think I would trade my oddball collection of friends for famous ones anyway. I have always liked Stephen King's writing a lot because he talks straight, and it feels like he's talking to me. I'm talking to you, I'm talking to you now. I've been hearing whispers in my head lately, visions of images that need to be described, people whose stories need to be told, bits of life that will haunt me forever and show up at the edges of my dreams unless I tell you about them. I'm not doing it to expand my resume, I don't care for the talent. The voices are talking back to me again, they're showing me pictures again, and you need to see them too. I don't care if people don't agree with what I have to show them and even if they get offended. That's their right. But if the voices stop talking to me again, I will have no one to take dictation from. And then I'll just be useless. Like a forgotten pencil lying at the back of the dark closet of your childhood.