Someone recently asked me what my writing process is, and I thought of Somerset Maugham when he said “I write only when inspiration strikes,” before adding “fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” The first half is true for me, though the second couldn’t be further. For as long as I can remember, I’ve hated mornings with a passion, and my inspiration tends to show up when it shouldn’t: in traffic, mid-flight, or just when the waiter tells me the café is closing.
The truth is, I write anywhere and everywhere. I’ve stopped trusting the idea of “ideal” conditions, although I am a sucker for pretty aesthetics. There are days when I convince myself a place or a mood will unlock something, and it doesn’t, and others when I assume the moment has passed, only for it to ambush me later. My drafts are scattered across A4 and pocket notebooks, the Notes app on my phone, emails stuck in my draft folder, and scraps of paper wedged between old receipts and journals. At any given time, I have a few notebooks on me and I’m working on just as many pieces. I wish I could say there’s a method in this madness, but there isn’t; or that I know which notebook carries what, but I don’t.
I’m lazy about organising, and often frustrated by the bells and whistles that seem to have become part of writing in the modern age — the indexing, the titling, and the posting gnaws at me, and I wish I could outsource that to someone else. Maybe that’s why I still haven’t renamed old Substack pieces for easier findability, or why I go through phases of enthusiasm and boredom with Instagram. A well-wisher once told me “the craft needs packaging,” which was much-needed advice, but I still wish I could just write when something strikes and leave it at that, without worrying about content schedules or whether the book will eventually sell.
Take this Monday, for instance. I had one of those slow starts — woke up late, lay in bed scrolling, and then spent an hour feeling guilty about it. By the time I finally reached a café, it was already noon. But once I sat down, something clicked. I stayed there until the staff politely asked me to leave at closing, which in India usually means 11pm, if not midnight. It turned into one of my most productive days in weeks, even if much of what I wrote won’t see the light of day for another year or more.
Yesterday, on the other hand, was the opposite. I was on a bus from Pune to Mumbai that should’ve arrived by midday but didn’t reach until half past three. I was hot, tired, and annoyed, stuck in a crawl that felt endless. Yet somewhere between the billboards and the horns, the frustration shifted into something else. I took out my notebook and began jotting down fragments of what I saw — men and women in the heat, exhaust pipes coughing, the stillness that sits just behind all that motion — and later, when I finally reached Mumbai and found a café, I wrote it all out properly.
Maybe that’s the process, that my writing happens in the pauses, in the delays, in the spaces between where I’m supposed to be and where I end up.
I’m writing this now from the lounge at Mumbai airport, waiting to board a flight. I hadn’t planned to share this piece — I was trying to be disciplined about what goes out and when — but this one feels right for today, and so here it is: the ramble that came out of that traffic jam.
Stalled in Mumbai
The roads of Mumbai are the city’s great leveller. An industrialist’s Mercedes idles beside a tempo full of workers sitting at the back, their eyes fixed somewhere beyond the traffic, shirts damp and dark with sweat. A black-and-yellow taxi stops mid-lane to let a mother and child climb in, the door slamming just as a motorbike grazes past. A truck painted with the names of gods crawls behind an ambulance that can’t move, its siren pleading for mercy from a sea of CNG-powered wheels that neither move nor stop, only shift restlessly. Some aren’t wearing enough, some are wearing too much, both sweltering under the same sun that yesterday hid behind pouring clouds but today melts the tar and clings to the skin.
Janta hai mera baap kaun hai?1 doesn’t work here, not unless your daddy can fly a helicopter down the Western Expressway and parachute you out of the jam. A billboard for the directorial debut of a Bollywood star’s son rises above the flyover, its title half-censored; the same restraint mirrored below, where there’s none of the usual swearing, only the slow resignation of people standing shoulder to shoulder, wheel to wheel, caught in the same unmoving heat. The real abuse begins only when traffic starts again, when someone cuts across, or when an engine hesitates a second too long and, just like in that debut, it’s only towards the end that the censoring comes undone.
Today, half the roads are closed. Someone important from Delhi is welcoming someone else important from across the seas, flying now though his predecessors once arrived by ship. Their faces line the highway, printed twelve feet high, joined by the smiling visages of the city’s political royalty, stretched across with hands folded, fluttering in the exhaust like theatre curtains. Barricades bloom at junctions, traffic police wave helplessly at the tide. Behind them, balconies drip with laundry — cottons and linens in blues, greens, pinks, and faded whites — while buildings sweat through the monsoon, their paint peeling like old skin.
A man in a Gandhi topi and another in a skullcap cross between bumpers. A father lifts his son onto his shoulders. Somewhere behind me, a conductor shouts, Bandra wale aage aao!2 and the bus stirs: elbows, bags, the shuffle of tired feet. The horns blare again, the city exhales diesel and dust, and for a brief second, it feels like the road might finally move.
Do you know who my dad is?
Those getting off at Bandra come forward.
Story of my life. Except for the Mumbai part. It’s remarkable how you’ve turned a small inkling into enjoyable reading.