I’ve always been a writer. The kid who carried a book everywhere she went, even in tiffin time. Eating with my right hand, clutching a book in the left. Because the world in front of me was always a little dull, and the world in the pages was endlessly interesting. On the first day of school each year, we’d get a stack of textbooks for the year - English, Marathi, Maths, Science - the full syllabus in one pile. I would go home and devour the whole stack in one sitting. Like a kid on a literary binge. 

Once, I recall falling while walking. And before I even got up, my eyes caught a crumpled piece of newspaper on the ground. I didn’t ignore it or brush it aside like any normal kid. I picked it up and read it. Right there, sprawled on the ground. If you asked me now what I read that day, I wouldn’t remember. I read everything, the newsprint that wrapped our food, instruction manuals for new gadgets, little things most would toss away. Obsession doesn’t even cut it. It was a full-on craving. Somehow, that compulsive reading built a secret ladder inside me, the exact one I climb whenever I write now.

I did not write as much then. At least not consciously. I simply read and told stories, gathered pieces of language, and stitched them into the patchwork of my broken understanding. I would read instruction manuals for household appliances, and the ordinary would become extraordinary under my gaze; the mundane instruction to “press start” was a command to enter another realm, one ruled by logic and possibility rather than chance. There was a weird alchemy in this early obsession. An instinctive search for patterns, narratives, and meaning that surpasses the surface. Writing is never born from inspiration alone. It is born from the necessity to carve out a consistent self out of the weight of experiences. 

This compulsion then transforms over time. Writing becomes less about consuming and more about becoming. It is a dialogue between silence and voice, between memory and forgetting, between presence and absence. When I write, I am simultaneously uncovering and constructing: excavating the fragments of who I was, while shaping who I might be in the future. The act of writing is also a negotiation with time. It compresses and expands moments we have forgotten about, collapsing entire lifetimes into a single sentence or stretching a breath into a paragraph. It is a crude refusal to accept that the meaning of anything is fixed or finite. In writing, the past is neither dead nor dormant; it is alive, malleable, and a constant source of continuous re-examination of the self and the world.

My relationship with language has always been intimate and vulnerable. It exposed the cracks beneath the polished surfaces. Even now it reveals the paradox of selfhood, how my give and take with identity is both so fluid and fragile, constructed yet elusive. To write is to inhabit uncertainty, to embrace the tension between what can be said and what must remain unsaid. Yet writing is also a refuge. It is a space where the self can retreat and resist, and where the resisted thoughts gather into a semblance of order. It is the pause between the chaos of living and the search for meaning. 

I don’t claim that I understand all the unknown forces that have shaped this impulse to write. Perhaps it might be a form of self-preservation or a way to resist erasure. Perhaps it is the fear of being forgotten by the very universe you so incessantly write about. Perhaps it is the simplest, most profound way to be a witness to oneself and to the world. The reader many a time imagines that the seeds of writing are sown in grand revelations or dramatic moments. But in reality, they begin in the smallest acts: reading a crumpled newspaper on the ground, absorbing the words on a forgotten manual, turning pages with a silent hunger.