Dipika Kohli
By Dipika Kohli
‘You need a transition here.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes.’
I’m aged sixteen and standing outside the art room at school, in the early evening hour. A twinge of reddish sunset is starting to color the short-haired, loopy carpeting, which is otherwise a plainer beige, not that anyone is looking.
A good friend of mine and I are crouching over four dot-matrix-printed pages, which are the leaves of my first-ever English paper. I am beaming.
She is tentative. After what seems like fifty-five minutes, (and may well have been), she looks up. In a voice that is kind, yet firm, she says, ‘Can I…?’, and nods slightly at what we will soon find out is a blunter-than-it-looks red color pencil that she has brought along just for this, and which I, for some reason, am twirling.
‘Thanks. This spot. See, we don’t know where this paragraph is going to take us, so add a line between this one, and this one… here. A transition. A kind of segue between the ideas, that’s what you need.’
‘Okay. How would I do that?’
As she embroiders red essays in a flurry in the margins, it gets dark fast. Fall in North Carolina. If it gets drafty, I can tell her I’m cold, and then, I can go get noodles at Northgate.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. So, are we finished here?’
‘I think so,’ she reiterated. ‘Write transitions. Between paragraphs.’
After the mall, I settle into my room and my desk, and switch on the desk lamp, one of those standard issues that you get when you’re a high school student, unflashy and functional. I direct my attention to the red scribbles but it’s hard to focus. I am so not going to get an ‘A’ in English.
On the one hand, this was gonna be a blemish to my academic career. On the other hand, what was the problem, really, with that, if I didn’t feel like it was very interesting as far as assignments go? It felt super boring to write a ‘persuasive paper.’ So, the next day I skipped English class and went to Francesa’s. I got an “Unexcused Absence.”
Ten years after not acing high school English, I found myself in Ireland, writing every single day for a small newspaper. I’d like to think we had a nice, lofty goal, something like capturing a moment in time of our shared cultural history, and I maybe got influenced by lots of tourists coming to find out about their Irish roots, or maybe the songwriters in my writing circle. We met on Fridays.
That’s probably where I found the right classroom for me. I learned by osmosis their art of poetry. We’d talk at length and laugh. They’d start ‘slagging’ each other, and it was a ‘gas.’
Ten years after that, I wrote my first book. This was trickiest for me to press ‘go’ on.
Before I did, I knew I had to reconnect with the very same old friend from high school, the one who’d helped me with the English paper. I needed to know what she’d think. Of the title, at least. I’d committed to the story and didn’t feel like changing it. I knew it was what I wanted it to be, only… I needed some kind of friendly… affirmation.
On a sunny day in summer, we found one another after a long spell. I told her I’d got a book written. ‘And I have a title.’ I was tentative.
She was beaming. ‘What is it?’
I told her. ‘Do you like it?’ All that fussing over the first draft – writing, rewriting, cutting things, putting things back, reframing, regrouping, spreading the pages out on the floor and peering into them late over many a night – had led me here, to this moment. I trusted her feedback.
‘Yes!’ No hesitation. Not even a smidge.
‘Really? So, should I go ahead with it?’
‘Yes.‘
Winging it is cool, since, ultimately, I feel the person who decides the value of a thing is the person who makes it. What was the most satisfying, though, wasn’t having something on the internet and a website, but having the conversations that came together, as a direct result of the effort. A book club invitation. A reading. Rekindling with old friends in West Cork, Ireland, who’d heard about it, and wanted to say, ‘Good girl, yourself. Grand stuff, altogether.’
I know now, recalling my teenage self, falling asleep on a desk, that I wasn’t wanting to write to make a point. I was looking for a different invitation to write. Writing… to connect.
Dipika Kohli is an author who is based in Phnom Penh. Discover her books at kismuth.com and other projects at dipikakohli.com.
