I've never understood people who don't "believe" in adoption. It is not some kind of article of faith that needs to be invested with belief. It is a human act of investing your emotion in another being. Representation pic/Thinkstock

I managed to restrain my annoyance with Jet Airways as I slunk into my middle seat at the back of the aircraft. The man occupying the window seat to my right was all sneeze and snot through the two-hour-five-minute airborne journey, but I tried, with relative success, to immerse myself in the Marguerite Duras interview I was reading. It was intriguing that two days before, Facebook showed up a memory from 2012, when I had visited Duras' grave at Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. On my last evening in Kolkata, I'd bought a book-length interview with her at the beautiful Seagull bookstore. Doubly intriguing was that I'd also purchased a copy of Helene Cixous' Tomb(e), the first book the French feminist had ever authored, back in 1970, and which she calls the "all-powerful-other of all my books, it sparks them off, makes them run, it is their Messiah." Cixous says that in 1968-69, she wanted to die, "that is to say, stop living, being killed, but it was blocked on all sides." Instead of suicide, she began to dream of writing a tomb for herself. So there I was, mid-air, perched nervously in an uncomfortable seat, contemplating the meaning of death, and something my ex-colleague at Nature Morte, the artist and curator, Peter Nagy, had said at a recent opening, about how artists and writers invest in their creative legacies as a means of transcending death itself.