I feel like I do when I begin an email to a much loved friend, when I’ve been the one to drop off from a long-running conversation— it has been a while, hasn’t it?
I will not use the excuse of a tumultuous year, or the roller-coaster ride of emotions that accompanied it— if you follow me on social media or have taken a stroll around the website, you already know that The Alchemy of Secrets was published last year, and to some attention. The truth is a bit more complicated than that, as well. It has been a while since I have been able to write. For much of the year, it has felt as if doom was just around the corner. Perhaps I was never as exposed to the suffering of the world as I was last year, or perhaps more accurately, I never paid as much attention. There were also deeply personal things I’d never considered before: the distance between continents when there are no flights, for instance. Mortality, my own or those of the people I loved, for another. It all added up to an absence of something vital. A sense of being unmoored; a distance from the person I used to be. It was as if there had always been a place of peace, of joy, that I could retreat to deep inside, and suddenly I had lost my directions to it.
During this year of being on-edge and just a bit off-balance, most of my creative energy was spent promoting my book. It was a task I embraced with the fervor of all new mothers everywhere, and occasionally even enjoyed. (The cringing and self-doubt shall remain firmly off-page.) But amidst all of that, hearing from people who read my book was a constant and repeated joy. It often felt like the only reliable one. In my everyday day life, everything had contracted and was constantly changing. In the surreal world I inhabited as a first-time author, I interacted with people I’d never met and sometimes felt as if I had known forever. Each was a gift. especially in that pandemic-cloistered space where I had become hyper-attuned to everything.
A few months ago, I received a distinctly odd message on Facebook Messenger. There was a woman in South Africa, writing to ask why no bookstores around her carried my book. There was a litany of bookstores that she contacted in India, who had refused to mail it to her. She sounded annoyed. Only India rights to the novel had sold, so I was unsurprised. I was also somewhat suspicious that this was some scam— really, would someone contact me if they hadn’t even read the book? I debated replying, and kept putting it off. A few weeks later, I received a similar email via the website and this time I wrote back. In our subsequent correspondence I discovered that she had heard about the book from an online book club, and wanted to read it not only because the story seemed intriguing, but because her ancestors were from India and she was trying to understand where she came from and what might have been. I offered to mail her a book from my dwindling stash, but procrastinated on my post-office run. A few weeks later, I woke up thinking of the books (hers and a few others) that I still hadn’t mailed out. I literally had them gathered up in the crook of my arm when I checked my email for the first time that morning. Nestled in the usual spam was an email from my South African friend. “Thank you, your book arrived,” was how it began, but there was more. Amidst a freak storm breaking around her as she wrote the email, she said, she saw a bird dive for cover. It was black, and blue, and the underside of its wings was red. It reminded her of my book’s cover, and she signed off saying she hoped it was a sign, and one that she took to mean that soaring success would ensue for the book.
We eventually sorted all out. Someone else had mailed her the book. I sent her a signed one to keep, as well. And I waited to hear what she would think when she finally read this book she had so determinedly pursued. Does anything ever live up to such expectation? Happily, by the five star reviews she left literally everywhere I looked, this was one of those instances.
It’s one of many stories I’ve been fortunate to be part of, and one I picked to tell because its improbability, in part, demanded its telling, but also because it’s filled with such generosity of spirit. (She also invited me to stay at her home if there was ever a South Africa book tour!) And also because for many days and weeks after, the whole episode seemed somehow a reassurance that everything (and not just the book) would turn out alright in the end.
I write this now in a time that seems more hopeful. The news is better, and I no longer feel impelled to follow it with the anxiety I did before. There are vaccines, and an end is in sight. We’ve made a transition from chaos and impending authoritarianism to decency and democracy here, even if that’s not true everywhere in the world, yet. I still cling to my escapist fiction, and leave the room when shows on Netflix turn to anything that resembles raw or real emotion. But new characters dance into vision each day, closer and with increasing solidity. And everyday I get closer to the place I used to retreat to, and write from. And with this blog post, I might have broken that dry and winter-long spell, after all. Hope is everything.