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 entire syllabus in one pile. I would go home and devour the whole stack in one sitting. Like a kid on a school textbook binge. 

Once, I recall falling while walking in front of the old SBI branch of my hometown. And before I even got up, my eyes caught a crumpled piece of paper on the ground with something written on it. I didn’t ignore it or brush it aside like any normal kid would have. 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 back then, 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 a not so seamless patchwork of my broken understanding. I would read instruction manuals for household appliances, and the ordinary would become extraordinary under my gaze. There was a weird alchemy in this early obsession. A primitive search for patterns, narratives, and meaning that surpasses the superficial understanding of the world. 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. 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 itself. It compresses and stretches the moments we have forgotten about. It is a refusal to accept that the meaning of anything is fixed or finite.

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. To write is to make uncertainty your default, to embrace the tension between what can be said and what must remain unsaid.

I don’t claim that I understand all the unknown forces that have shaped my impulse to write. Perhaps it might be a form of self-preservation. Perhaps it is my fear of being forgotten by the very universe I so obsessively write about. Perhaps it is the most profound way to be a witness to myself and to the world around.