Time at Stirling
I spent late spring and part of the summer of 2010 on the University of Stirling’s picturesque campus working on a draft of a second novel. The first month was (for me, at least) cold and frosty though the shops were optimistically displaying “summer” clothes. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that the Scottish summer is purely a matter of hope and imagination. That is to say, it takes place solely inside people’s heads.
After the hustle and bustle of Chennai, the silence of Stirling felt constructed, almost unreal, even loud. This got worse after the students left for the summer. The campus turned into hauntingly beautiful acres of empty space. Too quiet almost for someone like me who had just left behind a densely populated city. But the quiet time helped kick start my work wonderfully. And leaving the familiar behind often fuels the writing mind. You acquire a certain perspective, a certain useful distance from everything that you know or think you know.
I spent my mornings and afternoons writing – either in my apartment or in my room in the Department of English Studies. The staff and faculty at the department were wonderfully welcoming. John Drakakis, Katie, Scott, Stephen, Angela, Bethan, Alison, Jacqui and many others became my friends from another space that I slowly began to feel at home in. The department with its coffee and stimulating conversations is now part of me.
Evenings were spent taking long walks around the loch, past the swans and their signets and yes, an eighteenth century Italian style castle (the Airthrey castle) which now houses the Department of law. I would return to my apartment and spend a couple of hours reading Kelman, borrowed from the University library.
As an academic and a mother of two, I am pressed for time, torn in multiple directions. I forget sometimes that there is a big part of me that needs to write. That identity melts and disappears into other roles – more pressing and urgent. At Stirling, no one was aware of these other roles – they knew me only as a “writer from India” and so, for the first time, I felt as though I was walking on the right side of the road – not against the flow of traffic but with it! I didn’t have to steal time from anything or anyone to write and that was lovely. I had vast stretches of uninterrupted writing time – especially precious when you are working on longer narratives where it is so easy to loose the thread of words and ideas.
Sometimes though I missed the happy chaos, the small talk and the constant interruptions of my life back home. In many ways, it is this that makes up the “stream” of my consciousness, I think.
I gave a reading at the department which I thoroughly enjoyed! I read from my short story “These Things Happen if You Don’t Watch It” (which was eventually published in Wasafiri), an excerpt from my novel Table for Four (now out from Penguin) and a couple of poems. Towards the end of my stay in the U.K, I also participated in a reading held at Lauderdale house, London.
On the whole, I felt as though I was back to being myself again and I thoroughly enjoyed the fact that there were no “official” demands on my time.