Writing is a life by itself, with the ages thrown in. It seeps in learning, experience and runs parallel to the growth of the mind. Sounds ponderous, so please forgive. (We Indians are only impressed with ponderousness.) Summing up my muddied career in verse, first few volumes were visual: veni, vidi vici — who said that Caesar or Mussolini, I think Il Duce, beloved of our Right Wingers. Saw village India, wrote about it, saw Ganga at Banaras, wrote, a dargah at Amroha and the stories woven around it, wrote. One couldn’t pass over the landscape — so thought of faith, and people and history — can’t separate one from the other.

Took to novels with great excitement — wrote three of them. It is quite a challenge, manufacturing a world, people, events and burrowing within the times, the zamana or zeitgeist and dissecting it, getting an insightful nugget.

Back to poetry, my later volumes have my real poetry. Earlier, the exotic would first catch my eye, then brought in the scabrous to even things out. I let the imagination roam — never saw Mohenjo Daro, but wrote poems about it. Stole from literature —wrote elegies though no near one had died. When they died, the elegies had dried up.