Meena Kandasamy’s most recent Facebook status resonated deeply with me. Not the one in which she shares her incredible news about being inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an honour she richly deserves, but the one succeeding it, written just nine hours before I read it. She speaks candidly (and because I know and love her, I can almost hear her voice narrating this insight) about an encounter she had with someone who simply didn’t know her at all, who had asked her what she had done over the last 15 years or so. I know what it’s like to be in this predicament, when you have a sense of being a public persona, then meet with someone who seems to come from another planet, and you have to contextualise yourself, suddenly, in relation to another moon. Of course I am nowhere near as accomplished as Meena, definitely not in terms of volume of published books or level of audacious activism. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing her in the capacity of a peer since her collection of poems, Ms Militancy, was published by Navayana. Each of those poems helped me nurture my rage while simultaneously bringing me closer to the joy of irrepressibility. Anyway, this person who didn’t know of Meena’s career compelled her to find a way of pausing, I suppose, to reframe her trajectory.

Meena found that while she had a clear memory, she had little idea of dates or years. “And everytime I wanted to say what I was doing in a particular year, I was thinking that was the year I was working on this novel, and then I moved to this city where I had the baby and then worked on this novel, and somehow, the last 10-15 years of my life seem to be defined in terms of the books inside which I’ve lived, the only world I seem to have inhabited. When I was younger, I used to think of life in terms of relationships, I was with x, and then y, and then single, and then this… but now in my mid-30s, that sort of framing has become redundant. This is not self-definition, this is self-reflection. I was, at various points, the writer doing stuff, defined by what I was doing. Everything, even calendar years, became extraneous.”