I have been thinking about drafts. This is because I teach at the Social Communications Media department of the Sophia Polytechnic, a post-graduate course in media where I conduct journalism practicals and have done so for 25 years now. That means I have been on the receiving end of the first drafts of student writing for as long. And each year, I have to say it again: “Your second draft is always going to be better than your first draft. When you have finished, don’t just save and send. Stop. Take a 10-minute break. And then read your work again. You’ll see how much you need to change.”
As ordinary humans who have been placed in the situation of teaching, one tends to become infected by the notion that one knows of what one speaks. No one need tell me that; I wrote the book on second drafts.
But all of last week, in intermittent bursts, I have been editing a selection of the writings of Shanta Gokhale. And this means: I read it once. Shanta Gokhale read it once. Radhika Shenoy, our editor at Speaking Tiger publishing house, read it once. Then I read it again and sent it back to Radhika who sent me proofs and now I am reading it again and still finding things I want to change in my introduction. Will this never end?
The sea here
Of course it will. There comes a time when you have to sign off and send the file away. You have to say to yourself: I’ve done my best, now a new pair of eyes will flick over these pages and find the typo I missed because my eyes are not what they used to be.
So I wonder about the whole thing about letters, right? I mean, you do remember letters? People now write emails — though even that form is in peril with young people — but here is an excerpt from a letter written by the poet Dylan Thomas to Pamela Hansford Johnson: “I have decided not to get up today, to lie serene in my bed and write of the things that go round me, the shapes of shadows on my mountainous knees, the curving of my immaculate breast and the life in my ever-scribbling fingers. I have put on nice new pajamas, so this is going to be a pleasant day, and perhaps I shall not think of worms at all but only of the sun that I’m sure is shining in the curious world outside, and of other equally lazy people who, too, from the white islands of their beds are writing to ones they love on the commercial sea. In peril on the commercial sea. What is this death, this birth and apparent pain, this glib love, this rush to the head of so many extraneous creatures of the air that crowd my words and never let me stop a sentence at a nice, rhythmic stop? Don’t tell me.”
Thomas’ letters are wonderful things. They are works of art.
They are also letters.
I want to know how that happened. I want to know how you can write a letter that is a work of art. Look at that excerpt. ‘The curve of my immaculate breast’ has a wonderful odd feeling to it because it is a male breast and most male breasts tend to be maculate with last night’s roistering. The sea here, the sea, Dylan’s name means ‘son of the sea’, does that matter? Does that count? How does one swoop off one’s immaculate breast and over the perilous sea and across love and death and pain and...
There it is perhaps. ‘The extraneous creatures of the air that crowd my words.’
But when one writes a letter, is it natural to write a draft? A charged letter perhaps. One that might bring litigation in its wake, drafts, sure. But a letter to a friend, is a draft natural? Did Dylan write a draft or did he just... I can’t tell. For me writing is an unnatural act when looked at from the outside, a natural act when I am doing it, unnatural again when I consider how the ideas in my head are spent once they are out in this dark world and wide and I start to work on them, natural/ unnatural now in the reworking because something of the original must be tapped, but often the original has faded or has suffered a sea change into something rich and strange... is a poetry haunting natural or unnatural? Reading feels natural all the time, any time at all, but quoting what one has read? How contaminated is that by the desire to count off the canonical names, Thomas, Milton, Shakespeare?
Opening lines
What do we do with words in drafts? I have often said that for me writing a draft is like toilet-training a child. You do it so that no one else has to clean up afterwards. You’ve done your best. There may be some accidents but those happen in the ‘best-regulated households’. (Back-space, back-space, insert single inverted commas to indicate awareness of cliché, deliberately deployed.) But do we civilise or do we standardise? Do we take away the first wild delight in how it all seemed to be coming together? Is that comma going to help the reader or is it going to determine the reading of the line? How much ambiguity do you want?
I have trained myself to like ambiguity. I don’t think it’s natural to think of ambiguity as a friend, although in the writerly/ literary world you are supposed to embrace it. As a writer, I have a meaning, an intention in this line as in any other I have written. I should like it to be transmitted whole and perfect to my reader. But, of course, in my reading of the lines of other writers, I have brought myself to the act of reading.
I know that my reader, you in this case, if you have got this far, will bring yourself. You will have made judgements long before you started. This is The Hindu , a certain kind of piece. This is the supplement, another kind of piece. Jerry Pinto, hmm, identity politics anyone? And so to begin reading. Begin reading ? You began reading a long time ago. How will you not bring all that/ some of that to the opening lines?
And yet we write. And edit. And read. And sometimes re-read and discover that in re-reading we have re-edited the meaning we made in the first instance. This piece, we say, is not what it was. How could it be? We are not who we were.
It doesn’t stop. That’s magic.
The author tries to think and write and translate in the cacophony of Mumbai.
