When I pondered writing a book in 2017, it was mainly to have a distraction. I was lonely, isolated, and homeless—and I didn’t want to think about that. Writing has also been the place where I deconstructed my emotions since I was 14 years old; I was giving myself the therapy I couldn’t afford.
So I began writing Homeless (Homeless: Growing Up Lesbian and Dyslexic in India) as a distraction from my reality, while using it to deconstruct how I felt about my recent loss of position in the world. I had come out to my mother and lost her support— left to fend for myself when I couldn’t hold down a job or finish a course because of my dyslexia.
I had only recently been diagnosed with Dyslexia then and I needed time to adjust to it. I couldn’t deconstruct the emotions I felt literally, since in 2017, Section 377 was still a law and if I was caught writing about lesbian feelings, I could face expulsion from the university hostel which was the only temporary home I had. So I was deconstructing my emotions as fiction, something I’ve done successfully before.
But I couldn’t find fictional motives that explained why my protagonist would find herself in the very specific position I found myself in; I couldn’t imagine an identity similar to mine that I could give to my protagonist which would be similar to the realities of being in the intersection of, among other things, lesbian and dyslexic identities.
While I was trying to find my protagonist’s motive, Section 377 was struck down, I found a partner, and I moved with her to a rented house, and I was working at a corporate company where I was out to my manager. Suddenly, making my protagonist a lesbian didn’t feel like a risk; it wouldn’t lead me to lose my job or my partner or my house.
So my protagonist became a lesbian, but I still couldn’t write about why losing her position in the world was such a harsh reality without mentioning my dyslexia, and I also borrowed parts of my childhood to colour some of the details of her character. Before I knew it, I was writing about my own life.
But I’d still call it fiction because I was scared that my landlord would evict me if they found out that I was a lesbian. I would only have the courage to call it a memoir after I bought my own house. Virginia Woolf said, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Borrowing from that idea, I say, “A queer woman must have money and a home of her own if she is to write a memoir.”
— The author, K Vaishali, is the author of the memoir Homeless: Growing Up Lesbian and Dyslexic in India (published by Yoda Press and Simon and Schuster in March 2023). Her short fiction made the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize 2021 shortlist and the 2021 Disquiet International Literary prize longlist. She works for a tech company where she writes developer documentation for their products and leads their LGBTQ+ ERG for the JAPAC region. She’s the host of the podcast Queerious Connections available on Spotify and Amazon Music.
(Edited by : C H Unnikrishnan)
First Published: Jun 27, 2023 6:55 AM IST
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