The Little Black Book of Belonging

I am a writer. Phew. There, I said it. It is easier to say it without context than as a response to questions about how we spinners of imagined lives make a living. That is when we falter and fidget and look at our shoes held up with twine and try to remember our last day jobs that sort of fed us. The practical ones are in advertising where they use the power of their words to sell things they probably hate. With celebrity endorsements passing off as advertising these days, copywriters manage to conserve their creativity for real writing while drawing regular salaries. 

Or so I imagine them doing – and not without my share of envy. Some teach writing and spend their lives in the quest of the middle path between students who are either hopeless or competition. They learn to smile like idiots at the condescension of the suits that sign their paycheques. ‘No, sir. I don’t write motivational quotes.’ ‘No, sir. I did well in school and still chose to be a writer.’ ‘Yes, sir. Literary fiction is a real thing.’ 

The rest of us juggle odd jobs of varying oddness and weight on the soul. I won’t list them here, but the oddest one I have heard of is what my favourite writer, Rhys Hughes, once did to make rent: he was a bodyguard to a man dressed as a dolphin in a cultural festival where his task was to keep children from knocking down the porpoise on purpose.

Except for some ‘A-listers’, as they are called, and those who keep the pulp in the juice of their words for health reasons, most writers of fiction do not make a living off it. Attention spans are dwindling, literature has to compete with social media and the onslaught of the huge volume of video content produced by the day, and people simply don’t read for reading’s sake anymore. And publishing is a game of luck and chance and a lot of unsavoury experiences. But that is a topic for another day.    

But as if the knocks and shocks of the business of writing aren’t bad enough, we must contend with the disrespect of the great unread higher-ups who rule our lives. This is a story of my experience with renewing my passport recently. One would think paper in our line of work is a good thing -- but paperwork and writing are as dissimilar as chalk and chakhna. The lifecycle of a citizen in our day and age consists of birth, tackling mountains of paperwork to prove her existence, death, and someone else doing more paperwork to prove her lack of existence. And writers are people, too, as I keep insisting. So, why should we be spared the joys of documentation?

It all started when the clerk at the passport office asked me in Hindi (assuming, as always, every Indian’s knowledge of it) how I was born in Hubli in my old passport, and wished to be born in Hubballi in the new one. “Both, both are also same only”, I replied with the most stereotypical of South Indian accents. Feigning lack of knowledge of Hindi ever since I was bullied by Biharis in college (in South India at that) is my superpower. And sounding stupid around people of authority is a self-preserving instinct. “But recently spelling they have changed.” He gave me a suspicious look and sent me off to the place everyone dreads in a passport office: Counter No. Kaala-Paani, from where few mortals return. And that meant sitting in another queue.

But we writers are so used to waiting months and years before agents with numerologically-adjusted name spellings condescend to look at our manuscripts through their designer glasses before ghosting us to save themselves the effort of writing a rejection letter that waiting to be summoned to the counter at the end of the universe seemed like a walk in the…well…passport office. 

As I sat there swaying to the rhythm of the shaking leg of my neighbour on the conjoined seat, I saw a man walking around the office with a plunger. If I had faith in signs, I would have thought the whole experience would be like pulling up a turd. Thank god, I’m a disbeliever.

The lady at the said counter who stamped my papers seemed disappointed that they were in order. She let me go with a look that seemed like a warning against doing it again. But my real comeuppance -- for the guilt of not having a real job -- was to come at the police verification that is the next step in acquiring the ‘Little Black Book of Belonging’.   

I dialled the number of the policeman assigned to charging me guilty-until-proven-innocent to seek his audience. Aise na mujhe tum dekho, seene se laga loonga sang his caller-tune, and I worried if this ‘people-friendly police station’ might be a little too friendly. But my doubts were put to rest as I found him to be a perfectly normal policeman. Which is to say, he was not friendly at all.

“So, you are a writer?” he asked without much ado, glancing at my application. I hadn’t been employed in months and didn’t know what else to put in place of occupation on the day of the application and had decided to be truthful. “Yes, sir” I said.

“What do you write?” I mistook his disdain for interest and started to speak passionately about my modest accomplishments when he cut me short unceremoniously.

“Are you registered?”

“Registered where?”

“It says here,” he said, pointing to his computer screen facing away from me, “under the thingamajig 1888 Act that you must be registered in order to be paid for writing.”    

Hah! My good man, if only you knew how I roll in the dough! But I didn’t say that aloud and only gaped back as stupidly as possible.

“It is a punishable offence,” he said.

I gaped some more, and when he realised nothing sensible was forthcoming from my lips, he decided he had to find a resolution to the situation himself. “You are only doing time-pass, eh?” he asked. 

‘Appa? Is that you?’ I didn’t say that, of course. I simply nodded instead (stupidly, needless to say). I am a writer. My self-esteem is lower than my bank balance. You want to call my calling a pastime? Go ahead. 

He must have decided there wasn’t much to be gained by pursuing the third-degree with one as clueless as me. He stamped my papers and let me go but not without wondering aloud with a chuckle whether I would go home and write in my diary about this meeting. “Oh no, sir. I won’t. I might do origami today,” I assured him.

“But you got a story out of it,” a writer friend said when I narrated the incident on social media. Yes, I thought. We gather stories and we tell them. But why do we keep doing it in the face of all the insults and injuries? The simple answer for some of us is that we cannot not write. Thankfully, our passports don’t require us to say why we do what we do -- because that would have been impossible to explain.

(The writer is a Charles Wallace Fellow in Writing and Translation, novelist, poet, and translator)