I will write. And if the words don’t come to me, I will write about the not coming of words. The flow of an unused tap, the water rusty and excruciating in its slowness. Because it comes down to this. I have to write. Or I will be driven mad by the drip drip of my mind, the brown brackish pool that collects in hollows and basins, that leaves stubborn stains which no amount of scrubbing will cause to disappear. I have in mind no ideas, no plots, no characters, no endings. Just this typing, word following word, becoming words on a page. Nothing good will ever come of this. No short story, no novella, no blog post, not even a poem. Not a composition of five hundred words about my mother, something my eight year old son can churn out with practiced felicity in two languages. See, it’s happening already, things are oozing out. You know two things about me, or the me writing this: I have writer’s block; I have a bilingual eight year old son. Three, if you count the depression. Four if you count the talent for melodrama. Five if you count the self-referentiality.

You think I’m a woman, don’t you? I’ll employ a cheap trick and reveal I’m a man. I’m an advertising executive, bored. I got into copy writing because it was a way to make money off what came effortlessly. I am that particular cliché. One paragraph in, and the tap is already running dry. But I must not stop. I must not stop, no matter how hard it seems. Like the sinister husband in the Stanley Kubrick film, who writes the same thing over and over, pages after pages, novel length. (What he wrote: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.) Or the writer in the Ian McEwan story that I believed I could have written. (What she wrote: her previous novel word by word.) And that’s the other thing. The things I could have written. And the things that I could’ve written better. And then the things people steal from other people and no one but me notices. And the things I steal from my own things, savaging them, eating them out one sentence at a time. Always believing it’s an act of salvage. I feel I have written these words before. I wish I could write. Say something not trite. Not true necessarily, but something that would grow like trees under your skin. Where did that come from? I know I’ve written those words before. How long has it been with me? Lying there, waiting to drip out on to the page? I don’t even like trees. I like skin though. That’s yet another thing. The things I can’t get away from. Skin, for example. It covers all my writing like a bad rash. I don’t have a single piece that doesn’t involve skin – metaphorical skin, literal skin, epidermis, foreskin, membranes, coverings, exteriors. I have an enormous talent for the surface of things.

That’s all there is to it. I can’t write. I desperately want to. I have a son, a job, a reasonably happy marriage. My wife is a journalist, who was never in thrall of literariness. She communicates. She turns it on and the water flows clear. “I report things,” she says. “Imagination has nothing to do with it.” I envy her. We’re not that different, I write to sell things all the time. But I don’t see that as writing, that’s my job. Fiction doesn’t divide up neatly like that. For now, I am a copy writer, one half of a young urban couple. You probably know vaguely where we went for our last holiday. You’ve seen the pictures on Facebook. You’ve seen me in a traffic jam in the car next to yours, nodding to the radio, the clean cut commuter. But I am not any of these things, I can never inhabit the skin (there it is) of my characters long enough to be these things. I don’t like them enough, they don’t fit right. I’m bored already. I’d rather be the wife. Maybe I’ve been the wife all along. Or the child. I like writing as a child. My one published story is in the voice of a child.

Seven hundred words, and I’ve said nothing. Still, it’s seven hundred words. That’s a quarter of a short story. I will tell it in the third person, the second person address to the reader always irritates the hell out of me. It will read like a plot summary, a sketch. Not a short story at all. It doesn’t matter. I must get the words out. I must get the words out. I will not stop until my story is written. I’m a writer, it’s what I do. It is unimportant what my job is, what sex I am, where I was born, whether I am married, where I live. This is a story not the census report. I am something. Anything. A chair. A stain in a sink. The sink itself. I am that thing you’re thinking of. Any old thing. A book, a ribbon, a rusted tap, a mushroom. As long as that’s the thing I become. I need to forget myself in this telling.. But, something always interferes. It shuts down the valves, clogs up the pipes. Never let yourself get in the way of your stories, your stories will never get out.

Enough with the setup, the pre-telling. Let me narrate the particulars, the choices I’ve made about this fiction.

Three people live in a house. Two of them are adults married to each other for ten years. A man and a woman. An advertising executive and a journalist. The man wanted to be a writer but that is incidental to their story. They have a son. He is eight. They lived in a middle class suburb in a high rise apartment, what is called in their city a ‘society building’. Their son goes to a reasonably good school. One day he goes to school, and doesn’t come back. His parents go looking for him. They can’t find him. Two days pass. A whole week passes. They are by turns frantic, hopeful, guilty, blaming each other, blaming themselves, blaming the school. A month passes. The police can turn up nothing, his friends know nothing, no one saw him in school at all that day. They talk to politicians, to retired bureaucrats, to friends, to journalists. They talk about him constantly. His mother, who dropped him off in the morning, remembers him disappearing into the school gates, with a mass of other uniformed, bag carrying, crew cut eight year olds. Or so she thinks. She hangs on to the image of the back of his head, but it begins to fade from her memory. They can only remember him from the photographs. He is a mass of cheesy smiles and red- eyes. He is a grainy black and white shadow in a newspaper notice. He is passport sized and solemn against a lurid blue backdrop on Doordarshan. He is what he was wearing on that day, what he weighed, how tall he was, his distinguishing marks—he is the faint scar on his right eyebrow. There are no photographs of the back of his head.

His father begins to try and write a story about him. But it keeps turning into a story about himself, about his inability to write. His mother writes a few news pieces about his disappearance, about such disappearances. In one of the father’s narratives the boy is sighted miraculously in a faraway place in the North East of the country. It is to be a picaresque adventure– part travelogue, part memoir. The mother and father will pack a suitcase and go after the boy, leaving behind their lives. The end is that they recover the boy and return. He sees the end clearly, the three of them seated, on an aeroplane. But his writing cannot get past the beginning, the sighting of the boy in a jungle. It is lifted almost entirely sentence for sentence from one of his wife’s articles about just such an occurrence. He writes the dedication many times. It is dedicated to his son. Sometimes he uses the initials. This strikes him as particularly mawkish, and he has to delete the words quickly, sometimes he deletes the entire file.

You’re right. This is my story. This is what happened to us. This is how we lost our son. I always thought if I had the material of a moving life I could make a story of it. But this has happened to me and nothing good has come of it. Nothing fictional has come of my son’s disappearance. I have the material, but I can’t remember the back of his head anymore. Sorry. That was my wife, who couldn’t remember the back of his head. The problem with this picture is that my wife’s not real at all in this story. She’s a prop, a cliché – flat as a pancake, dry as sand paper. If I set her on fire you would feel no pain. She does not move you. I need more details.

The boy is called Rohan. The school is called Sacred Heart, the suburb is Andheri, the city is Mumbai. The building they live in is Shivam Apartments, cheek by jowl with Satyam and Sundaram.

That last touch was too much. It was, wasn’t it? But I must not worry. I must not second guess. I must write. I must only write.

The wife weighs fifty eight kilos. She’s five feet tall. She grew up in Calcutta. Her name is Rukmini. The husband calls her Mini. His name is Ranjit, which is what she calls him. They are both Bengalis, though he grew up in Bombay.

Is this enough biography? Enough geography? Do you see them now? Do you see the back of his head bobbing with the other crew cuts, above the other school bags, disappearing behind the school gates?

I am the boy. I am inside the school gate. My mother has just waved to me from the auto as she dropped me off. I disappeared. I ran away. I got kidnapped. I got disemboweled and devoured by a gang of older boys in the third floor bathroom. I killed myself. I got molested by the chemistry teacher and could not face the world. I never existed. My father made me up, like I made up my mother in the composition. There are other possibilities, I got mixed up with the wrong crowd, I got murdered. I changed appearance and became another family’s son. I lost my memory and was found in a village in Arunachal Pradesh three years later. I entered another time space. I went back to the past, forward to the future. I turned into a girl. Something. Anything. A chair, a book, a ribbon, a mushroom, a puppet, a zombie. I am right here but you cannot see me. I am a figment of my father’s fancy.

No. That’s not working. Let’s try it again. Remember to leave the self out.

The boy disappeared into the school. He was late for the third time that week. He waited by the gate for his friend Arvind. They were inseparable. He felt he was nothing without Arvind, a shadow. Arvind was the substance. They always stood together in assembly, amongst the rows and columns of boys, happy to keep each other company. The bell rang, the assembly began. He didn’t join the boys in the hall. He waited, safe from the eyes of the prefects in an alcove under the stairs, behind the glass case with the statute of Jesus holding his flaming heart. Arvind did not come that day. He saw his class file past him after assembly. He heard the stamp of shoes, the scrape of desks, the banging of dusters, the shouts of boys. He heard the sudden grim cessation of noise as classes began. No one thought of him. His mother was working on a fresh story. His father was writing copy for a new brand of sanitary ware. His class teacher recorded his absence in the register. He felt insubstantial, unmissed. He was sleepy. He began to feel himself growing more indistinct. He dropped into sleep, and woke up to voices. It was recess. He could not bring himself to join back in the world of the school boys. They seemed too much.

He began to feel strangely light, like he had no skin. He thought of the chalk dust that blew when the monitor banged the duster. How they stayed suspended in space for a moment, and then slowly settled everywhere. He felt he was a cloud of particles hanging in midair, taking the hazy shape of his body. He sensed himself growing powdery, disintegrating one limb at a time. He began to disperse. By the time the last bell rang, and the school gates closed he was not there at all. He was entirely gone. Not even the back of his head remained.

There. I’ve written it. I’ve managed to hold myself in abeyance long enough to be able to tell you this much. I should go on. The boy disappears. That’s something. Something has already happened. But the wife is still a problem. She’s barely a presence, a will o’ wisp of whimsy. I need to write her, to fill her in with detail. This is the way to do it. One thing at a time. One character, one event, one sentence, one word.

Rukmini Roy grew up in Calcutta, and came to Bombay at eighteen for a mass communications degree. Not because she hated Cal, but because she wanted something less cloying. She met Ranjit at a party thrown by a friend of a friend. They were both nineteen. They went around for seven years before they got married, during which time they broke up several times, each time jointly destroying their relationship memorabilia. In these interludes they both saw other people. Their relationship was considered tumultuous. Somehow, they always managed to fall back into each other ‘like flaming wrecks,’ a friend once said, ‘and rise again like bloody phoenixes’. They moved in together when she got her first job as a way to save on rent,. His parents had moved to Pune a year before. They lived together in a series of crummy apartments until they got tired of the [by then] barely concealed subterfuge of their cohabitation, and got married in 2000. It was a big Bengali wedding.

I need more. I need a reason why they love each other. I need love itself. Because there is love, isn’t there? It isn’t just living together in a series of houses, it is fusing together slowly. It is like bearing witness, like bearing grudges, like bearing secrets, like bearing a child. It is like days and nights and fevers and an abortion and sex and furniture and fixtures and home loans and breakfasts and birthdays. It is all of that. I need to be her, not just love her.

I am the wife. When Rohan was born I took a year off from work. I think of it as the best year of my life, except maybe the year I moved to Bombay. I think over all, I’ve had several good years. The day after Rohan died [I have taught myself to say that. It’s strange how the thought calms me] both my Ma and Baba and Ranjit’s parents came to stay with us. For three days the mothers took over the kitchen. There was so much food, I ran out of Tupperware. I remember organizing extra mattresses and a long discussion on sleeping arrangements. How to squeeze three pairs of people into a seven hundred and fifty square foot apartment? Somehow, I don’t recall why Ranjit and I ended up in Rohan’s room. Rohan’s room has a bunk bed. I can’t remember sleeping that night, only that it was a very hot night. I remember putting the mattress back on the top bunk the next morning, so we must have lain down together on the floor at some point. I must have held him. I remember what we ate for lunch. I remember police stations and police men. Then, each name carried a different charge of urgency. Now their faces have blurred, their names have detached from the faces. Their numbers are still on my phone .I keep meaning to delete them, but I forget. Or maybe I did delete them? Perhaps they’re gone already.

Lately, I constantly feel things are slipping away from me, leaving me without my knowledge. Not just names, or faces, even my thoughts seem to get away before I can focus on them .It’s a vague, uncomfortable feeling that I can’t fully describe. Objects, people, time, information, money, families, lovers, memories, whole cities – everything seems filled with the intent to leave me. It’s not loss or forgetting exactly, nothing as accidental as that. It’s something much more secretive altogether, somehow more malicious. On some days I cannot bring myself to speak at all for fear of what may sneak out while the guards are asleep at my borders. It’s like I can’t keep the outsiders out or the insiders in anymore. A feeling akin to what I imagine incontinence must be like.

I watch myself at all times while I write, hoping I will surprise them in the act of leaving. Often I find myself hovering over the ‘send’ button pitting the evidence of my eyes against a sensation more visceral – a clear remembrance, a reverberation in the air like a door that was banged shut seconds before you entered the room. I have a feeling in my fingers, in my gut, that tells me I did indeed write the words, that I’m failing to see them in my rereading, but nonetheless they are there. The impression is persistent and, in the case of official emails, almost panicky. I must pore over my sent mails several times a day . I find myself letting things lie indefinitely in my drafts folder. For someone whose work is mostly over email this can be difficult.

I have told nobody about this. I have considered several tricks, diversions and remedies, toyed with various explanations and attitudes. It is a just a harmless curiosity I sometimes tell myself, it’s a quirk, an eccentricity, a benign little habit of the mind. Those are the best days. On days not so good I turn relentlessly Freudian on myself, plumbing the depths of my subconscious for inner meanings, purposive forgettings. Did I want to lose my son? Do I want to lose my husband? Am I losing my mind? There must be a psychiatric name for what I’m developing, as there is for all conditions, but I’m not overly eager to find out. What good does naming things do? It does not hold things in place. Things are constantly coming unhinged from their names, from their places. I simply can’t shake the feeling that things are departing that things have already left, even as I write this. Writing it does no good, writing it offers no solace. Writing will not hold things in their place. I live alone in this house, amidst these slipping sliding things. Ranjit left yesterday. Ranjit left last year. Ranjit left before Rohan. Rohan’s was the last departure. I know now that everything has always been leaving me. That everything is almost gone.