It is not even an office, actually. It is the front rooms of an aging house with old electric switches and graying wooden doors, scarred from where the weather has bitten them. I sit at a large table in another room, alone, with a brand new computer in front of me, folding my legs in every position possible to be able to rest the keyboard on it, for it is rather uncomfortable kept on the table. (It is on the table now, and as I arch forward, my back creeks.) Every now and then, I also keep wiping my hands, obsessively, on my unwashed, greasy jeans, trying to rid them of the dust that I cannot see, but I know is there. (For one morbid moment, I think of Lady Macbeth, and then of how I have always wanted to play her on stage.) But there will be dust. We make books here, and books make dust.

I cannot work, so I stare at the book in front of me. My Friend, My Enemy, Ismat Chugtai, translated from the Urdu by Tahira Naqvi. I have been carrying it around for a while now, a library due date stamped on an inside page, disrespectfully tilted. Why do I not read it? Because I am afraid of discovering all that I lose out on because I do not read Urdu, because I’m afraid a very big part of the little that my schooling has given me is English. And I am afraid of losing meaning to English. Even words get tight lipped and trussed in bow ties and bowler hats when English. Unsentimental. Too polished, too practiced. Just not raw enough…too phobic to be able to tell the story of two women under a quilt…The Quilt, it is called. Not Lihaaf, but The Quilt. I wonder what they would have called Chauthi ka Jaura. I think they let it be because ‘Dress for the Fourth Night’ might not have sounded very nice. Thank God. Or whomever.

Chauthi ka Juara. I think of the screenplay I wrote for this (yes, for the English version). It must still be lying somewhere in the house, draft after tattered draft, and the final typed out copy. He had liked it very much, CVS Sarma, he had said I must make it into a film. (“In Urdu”, I had argued across the table, sitting in his badly lit ‘staff room’.)

He died in February this year. I had gone to the funeral, and watched as they forced his son to go through the drills of a million brahminical rituals, destroying in death every single belief, or disbelief, that he had stood for in life. I think of him often…of that day when we were all sitting in the studio, and I had declared with authority to the rest of the class that saathi haath bataana was from Mother India. Of course they believed me. Until quietly, from the back of the room, CVS smiled at me and said, “It’s from Naya Daur” Yes, I do think of him often. Excuse the cliché, for it is true.

But the office: yes, to work, now.