Hope.

Every time I read Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel Prize citation lecture, ‘My Father’s Suitcase’, I am transported to a day I can’t now fully recall. Every growing child has that day, when, shielded from the vicissitudes of reality, it wants to become a painter, a musician, a writer, something it knows bridges the gap between what it wants to do and what it thinks will sate its parents’ hopes for itself. Even though I can’t remember all about that day, I’m sure I thought I wanted to be a writer. I would have wanted to write all that I read, but in a way that it preserved me. I would have wanted to write to partake of the only tradition I knew – literature – so I would not be forgotten. At every turn, I would despair that I was going farther from my dream growing older, but I would still attempt to reach out to that tradition. What has kept me going till now is that every time I would reach out, it would reach into me, and remind me that I would only have to divert my gaze inward, to bring forth an imagined reality that would help me survive this one. All this Orhan speaks of. His insight is inescapable, I must admit; yet, I do not regret that I borrow from him without striving – with that stubbornness Orhan finds is central to being a writer – to find my own words. I am not yet a writer, but I still hope to be one. And ashamedly I admit: When that day comes, I hope I find the tradition is still alive in me.