On a recent visit to Calcutta, I learned a new word to describe what I sometimes engage in: flânerie.
     I heard it at the Oxford Bookstore where they launched Memory’s Gold, a new anthology on Calcutta. Amit Chaudhuri, the editor, highlighted a section of the book titled ‘Flânerie’. It includes pieces on adda and the cityscape of puja pandals. Looking up the word later, I discovered that it has no precise English equivalent but suggests aimless strolling through city streets. Balzac insisted, “To stroll is to vegetate, to flâneur is to live.”
     Just the day before the book launch, I had taken another long walk through Calcutta. I had no great purpose in mind as I tramped from Hastings to Howrah, then over to Sealdah. But once I approached Sealdah, my loitering took on a goal: the search for an address from the past.
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When the white crescent on green flag was hoisted in Dhaka, as the Raj took leave, I was yet to be born. The only family story I have heard of that day is that my Dada — really my Nana, my mother's father — lit a cigarette. He was not a smoker.
    Lighting a cigarette can have different meanings. Some smoke to calm their nerves. Some light up after they make love. I was never a habitual smoker. Now and then I smoked with friends, enjoying their company. One winter I even tried cigarettes to ward off cold.
    For my grandfather, it was an act of celebration.
    There would have been others that day smoking with different feelings. For many, their lives turned upside down, that day was not a happy one.

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Forget inspiration, forget talent, don’t worry about imagination: her advice for a new fiction writer was simple.
     "Persist," she said.
     Around the time I discovered Octavia Butler’s writing advice, I was still new to writing fiction. I was anxious about both inspiration and talent. I worried about imagination, since in my rather complicated life I had picked up a thousand or more ‘real life’ stories, enough to write many, many pages of narrative. I remember telling my first fiction workshop teacher, Elena Rivera, that I wanted to learn how to break out of the grip of real-life experience.
     Twelve years after I typed out my first ’story,’ I have to say, Octavia was on point. Persistence rewards.

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While speaking to a few dozen friends recently, I tried out a confession.  I said that I was not really who I claimed to be; I was not as old as they knew me and that I had stolen the identity of someone older, someone who had gone through a much richer vein of experiences than I.
     It was a joke, and it fell completely flat.  Only a few people knew the references.  None seemed to care.
     I was making fun of two figures from the writing world who had just been in the news.  James Frey had been exposed by The Smoking Gun for having exaggerated many chapters in his life for his memoir A Million Little Pieces.  And J.T. Leroy had been exposed as not the bad boy male writer he claimed to be, but a woman who had apparently done none of what the author had claimed.
     Perhaps we writers get more excited by what other writers do than most people.
     But I understand the impulse to make believe.

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If you go to Dhaka, Bangladesh, you may come across a place called "Bangla Motors." Buses stop there, and rickshaws, CNG’s, and taxis can get you there. It stands at the intersection of Mymensingh and Moghbazaar roads, roughly halfway between the Shonargaon and Sheraton hotels. Do not, however, look for a business by the name of "Bangla Motors." There isn’t one.
    There never was. The name is testimony to the determined way Bangladeshis were eager to wipe out the legacy of Pakistani rule after the country became independent.

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Laila Lalami was in San Francisco last week to promote her novel, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. She, of moorishgirl.com fame, was born in Morocco and came to the U.S. for grad school. In the Q&A, an Indian man questioned her on her choice of writing in English. He said he was grappling with the challenge of writing in a language that is not one’s first language. Laila replied that while her native tongue is Arabic, her first literary language, learned in school, was French, but later as a result of coming to America, English has become her writing language. She mentioned some of the difficulties that come up, e.g. how to reproduce dialogue that in real life is taking place in Arabic, and how some idioms are simply untranslatable.
    This got me thinking — again — of the relationship between one’s writing language and mother tongue. This is a huge subject, but let me jot down a few thoughts here.

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I wrote a letter this weekend, the old-fashioned way.  Pen to paper.  I even dragged out an old box of  parchment paper that had been gathering dust.  The act was not spontaneous: the letter was requested by a friend who’s at a writing retreat for two months.
    It felt good.  I wrote five pages, and my handwriting was not as bad as I feared it might be. I enjoyed the feel of the envelope in my hand as I trudged down to the mailbox.
    Letter writing in the age of e-mail, some say, is a lost art; they bemoan the loss of feeling as pen scratches away at paper or the dreamy stare into space as you compose your feelings into words.
    I’m not so sure.  The greater pleasure may be felt by the one who receives.  To open your mailbox and see — in the thicket of bills, junk mail, and magazines — an envelope addressed by hand bearing a familiar name, then tearing it open as you retreat into your home, the thrill is all there.  It is that which I miss.

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