Uma's Literacy Autobiography
The TRUTH
knocks on the door
and you say,
"Go away, I'm looking for the truth,"
and so it goes
away.
Robert Pirsig
I was born in New Delhi, India. My mother traveled to her parents' home to give birth to me. That was the custom. My grandfather worked for the Government of India in Delhi, and that's why I was born there. Here I am at 4 months. This picture was taken soon after my mother brought me back to Wellington, in the Nilgiri Hills of south India, where my parents lived at the time.
Maybe I still like to travel because I started so early!
A Remington manual typewriter made me a writer.
My father still has that old typewriter. It has the clean sharp smell of inky ribbon, and when you strike the keys the metal letters fly up to hit that ribbon and place an imprint on the paper. You never have to figure out how to turn it on.
The marks on the typewriter are from years of celebrating Saraswati Puja, the special day of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of learning. On Saraswati Puja, which comes around in October each year, we'd place these sandal wood and ochre marks on books, pencils and pens, musical instruments, and my father's old typewriter.
You couldn't touch any of these things on that day. You were supposed to let the goddess bless them, so they could serve you well the rest of the year.
Between the ages of five and eleven, I hammered those keys as if I was possessed. I wrote stories and typed them up. I stapled them together and hid them in drawers and bookcases with warnings that read, "Danger" and "Enter At Your Own Risk."
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Here's the government house in Wellington where we lived when I was a baby. I don't remember it at all, since we left there when I was only two years old, but in 2001, on a trip to India, I got to visit the family living there, and I took this photograph. The house has a name: Sunny Villa. The first story I ever wrote was in green crayon on a wall. Of course, it got painted over, so I have no idea what it was about. My advice--stick to paper. |
At ten, I began sending my writing off to magazines. At thirteen, my first poem was published in "Children's World," a children's magazine begun in India by a farsighted man called Shankar who drew cartoons and believed in kids. I don't remember much about that poem, except that it tried very hard to sound grown-up. But I do remember the thrill of seeing my name in print.
Reading has always gone hand in hand with writing in my life. You can't write unless you read. In my childhood, I read everything I could lay my hands on, including Winnie-the-Pooh, Hans Christian Anderson (The Little Mermaid made me cry for days on end, and still I kept going back to reread it), Beatrix Potter, and later on Louisa May Alcott and Charles Dickens. I also devoured series fiction by a writer whose books for some odd reason were hugely popular in India--Enid Blyton. There was a lot in Blyton's books that mystified me. I didn't know what scones were, and I couldn't understand why someone would say, upon seeing the sea, "Oh, I'm dying to go bathe," but I wasn't about to be stopped by little things like that. I probably read close to every book EB wrote. She did have a great sense of story. Maybe I was absorbing her openings and scene transitions without knowing it.
In the 1980s in England, Blyton's books were criticized as racist and anti-feminist. I don't think she set out to write racist books, even though racist thinking was certainly widely prevalent in her time. Still, even though I was a little upset to find she'd named a villainous South American chieftain after me (his name was Raya Uma!) I have many fond Enid Blyton memories. She taught me to race through stories, breathless, heading for drama and denouement, reading for context and clue. It's not a bad lesson to remember, now that I'm writing fiction.
Where do lizards enter into my writing life? In India lizards (geckoes) often live on the walls and ceilings of houses. They play an important role, eating mosquitoes and other insect pests. When I was a child, I was terrified of them, and convinced that if I didn't keep a sharp eye out, a lizard would someday have a heart attack and fall off the ceiling onto my head. It never happened. Now I live in New Mexico, where lizards are important to ecology, art, and the traditional cultures of the region. To me the lizard represents both my overcoming of a childhood fear, and a beautiful, useful creature, on a wall, watching.
I think I was in danger of sending the truth away when it came knocking. All the years I worked at other jobs I'd keep volunteering to write case reports, articles, grants, without ever realizing that I was a writer. It took me many years, several career detours, marriage and the birth of my son, before it finally occurred to me that real live people wrote books for children.
This evolving literacy autobiography was begun in 2002, during the San Juan-4 Corners Writing Project summer institute, Farmington New Mexico. Like its author, it is a work in progress.