There are some things I will never forget about Stirling. My first sight of daffodils, for instance. The poem ‘Daffodils’ was on our school syllabus and I simply did not get the fuss. But as soon as I arrived, I found Angela Smith bringing in a bunch of cut daffodils, arranging them in a vase in the apartment. Under the forever shifting greys of the spring sky, the ever-present risk of rain, the intense yellow of daffodils began to make sense. I finally do get the fuss!
The campus ducks were another source of joy. The students continually overfed them, as did I. We discreetly vied for their attention and I remain curious about their cookie-fattened fates.
I came to Stirling in 2006, a young journalist relieved at the hesitant acceptance of her fledgling poems in an anthology of new writing in India, and thrilled to be ‘writer in residence’ somewhere. I had intended to work on a first novel and once I got to Stirling, I took my writerly self very seriously for nearly four weeks. I wrote at least six hours a day.
When I couldn’t think of what to do with the story, I would start writing poems instead. I must have written at least four or five quite decent poems over those two months. When I did not feel like writing poems, I would write a diary. Being naturally reserved and socially diffident at the time, I did not know what to do except write and take short walks around the campus for the first few weeks. Eventually, I did see parts of Stirling, including the campus, Wallace monument (the Mel Gibson-modelled statue is a story I continue to dine off), and Glasgow.
But despite my reluctance to get out of the campus, those weeks was an incredibly enriching cultural experience. I don’t even have to open my Stirling diary to recall that one of the most rousing contemporary dance performances I have ever seen was on the campus. The first time I sat in on a ‘lively’ academic conversation about pop culture imagery was at the English department. I am not a literature post-graduate and had never participated in ‘university life’. Presentations of papers on specific aspects of literature, intense yet civilized debates about art – this was new to me. It was energizing and soothing to be a guest in an environment where the meanings and intent of words mattered.
At the end of about ten weeks, I thought I had a first draft of a novel. Back home, I decided I had no such thing. In fact, I decided that the whole book was a false start and that I did not want to write a novel at this stage. I extracted two chapters I really liked and used them as inter-linked short stories in a book ‘The Good Indian Girl’, which I later co-wrote with Smriti Ravindra.
What I did have were the new poems. Poems which had come out of me being in a new place, needing to look at myself and explain myself in new ways. Poems that I began to read out in public. I think an important writing lesson I learnt after those eleven weeks in Stirling was to keep writing what I can write. Whatever my inner self is leaning towards, to allow it.
I try to write in as many ways as I can. I like testing myself against genre and form. That’s how I continue to write and grow. And I think being at Stirling was an important first step in this process. Journaling, for instance, has become a habit since 2006 and I have learnt to enjoy it for its own sake – a space that encourages the dropping of artifice and pretensions to craft, and yet capture the beauty and bewilderment of the moment.
Let me end then with a paragraph from my Stirling diary:
“In Delhi winters, at six, the sun has set. The sky is a confirmed shade of grey, fast turning to black. Within half an hour, it’s night. A noisy, bus-filled, horn-filled, smoky black. But decidedly black.
Last night, I was surprised by another thing here. There was light until eight. Even at nine, it was still evening. A blue, blue light. A deep blue that was short of midnight and nowhere near royal. A blue that I’ve not seen as ink or even in illustrated fairy-tale books. But there was a familiarity to it. I couldn’t describe that blue but if you’ve ever used water colours, there’s a shade called ‘Prussian Blue’ in the big boxes. Prussian comes close. I like to use it to describe the sky of last night though it means nothing. What does Prussian Blue mean? Prussia was a kingdom. To one side of Russia. Maybe the soldiers wore it. Maybe the king wore it… who knows? I think of it as a bottle in my watercolour box. I think of it as the sky at nine in the night, in Stirling.”
