By VILAS SARANG I have been asked to write about myself as a writer. That's the slot for me, apparently. However, I happen to be a questionable sort of writer. I wrote my first mature story, Flies, in the summer (Indian) of 1963, between the two years of the M.A. in English literature I was then reading for. As it happens, I wrote this story in English. Dilip Chitre was editing a special issue of a renowned magazine, Abhiruchi, run by his father, and I made a hasty crib, to my mind unsatisfactory and lacking the style of the original, for the issue. Flies appeared in Abhiruchi in 1965; the English text appeared in London Magazine in 1981. (I felt flattered that Alan Ross in 1981 thought of a story written in 1963 as new and significant.) As by then my other, later stories written in had appeared in English as translations, I allowed this story to appear in LM as Translated from the and that is how it stands in my 1990 collection, Fair Tree of the Void (Penguin India). Well, there's a Marathi writer for you!1 Even the stories et cetera first written in by me are often covertly English. I remember composing the long final sentence of The Terrorist (which I wrote first, and then worked toward it from the beginning) in Marathi, mentally translating, laboriously over an entire day in my tiny apartment in the benighted city of Basra, a complex English syntax into my native tongue: still, the long, rolling rhythms of that final sentence in the English version are but a shadow in the original Marathi. allusions to Kafka and Eliot in Testimony of an Indian Vulture sit uneasily in the text but come into their own in the English. Numerous examples of this sort could be given. rhythms in my head are the rhythms of English, and they come into their own only when I do the original text into English. As a matter of fact, I regard the English versions of my stories as the definitive text, and the original as only a stage toward the final casting. This might sound like a strange admission from a Marathi writer, and I anticipate the inevitable qu stion: why, then, do I write in Marathi? answer is that I cannot, and do not wish to, spurn my roots in the language. Till the age of sixteen, I read only Marathi. At sixteen, I read my first full-length book in English (Jim Corbett, ManEating Leopard of Rudraprayag), and thereafter it was almost exclusively English, English, and Englis . For most of my adult life, my stream of consciousness has flowed in English, and it is in a way odd that, when I sit down to write, I switch to thinking in Marathi. My conscious mind may funct on through English, but my unconscious is rooted in Marathi; and to draw upon the resources of my unconscious, I must go through the initial rites of passage in my native tongue. However, the conscious part of my mind being situated in English, it still remains necessary to re-create the text in English. To write first in Marathi, then to redo the text in English, is thus a means of reconciling the two halves of my divided psyche. A more down-to-earth explanation is that, writing in Marathi, I do not have to worry over prepositions and articles. I feel I can be more freely inventive and innovative working in Marathi. Sort of, do your devil-may-care experiments in your backyard, and then bring them before the world. At the same time, I have always thought of myself as belonging, in my own small way, to an admittedly somewhat nebulous international modernist tradition. It is also, should I say inevitably, a Western/European tradition. I have imagined myself as working in the context of writers I have admired most: Kafka, Hemingway, Camus, Beckett, et alii. literature is so hopelessly mired in the stickin-the-mud middle-class ethos and reflexes, with its peculiar literary style (laden with exclamation marks!) that would appear antediluvian in English, that, from the beginning, I refused to have any truck with the sensibility it represented. narrow, and subtly caste-marked, paths of literature I saw as something to avoid at any cost; a largely selfinvented international tradition offered a liberating route to self-realization.