A bunch of small picnic-like portable tables were placed on the sidewalk, shaping a familiar office setting. Only men were behind those small street desks of a size big enough to fit a typewriter and a few papers. As I approached them, the ubiquitous melody of mechanical tak-tak sounds surrounded me, gradually attenuating the honking jam session of the city traffic. In front of one of the folding desks were two women, sitting down and looking up towards the typist who was shaping the official documents they required.

That was Mumbai, lots of sandals, extreme sultriness, extreme crowds, extreme dirtiness, and an apparently infinite list of extreme everything. It was 2012, the year I surrendered my way of living for a trip to India. A few years have passed since then, but even now, looking back after all this time, I still remember that moment clearly. The two women, the narrow line of self-employed professionals tik-taking on the street, the bystanders marvelling at the fresh ink covering the sheets of paper, and that one typist reviewing his words, staring at his work with an intellectual look, as if that expression was something exclusive, something which came along with his craft.

Being that my first week in India (and also due to my overall ignorance), I presumed the reason why those two ladies required the services of the typists was related to illiteracy. Contemplating the situation for a while longer, I began to fantasise with the idea that they needed a letter sent to their loved ones abroad, that the typists didn’t have an office to work in, or if they had, that they just preferred to work outdoors; I imagined the street typing was an event of some sort, possibly a sport, and entertained the thought that they all were just writing a book collectively, or maybe even holding a creativity meeting or performing a demonstration of automatic writing as if they were the dadaist branch of India. But despite (or maybe because of) my premature assumptions, I wasn’t getting any closer to understanding the underlying truth behind that foreign scene. I would later learn though, that there were many chances that my initial assumption was wrong; especially considering that having the High Court and other government offices nearby, those women probably required the services of the typist to conduct legal affairs. It was in the midst of trying to understand the reality of that foreign image, that somehow I let go, unknowingly, and I found myself staring at the typists just like the men around them, mesmerised.

* * *

Besides reading Plato’s Phaedrus back at university and thinking about it for a considerable amount of time, throughout my life I had just taken writing as the most effective medium for global memory; and sometimes even as the most effective medium for communication and thought (an action of self-communication, of self-discovery). Writing had always been and felt like a natural thing to do, too natural to understand it as a non-structural behaviour, too sporadic and common to reflect upon its process. But after witnessing the typist work with his old typewriter and the two women who were seemingly discussing what to write, I began to wonder about what I understood writing to be. On that moment I thought I was staring at two completely different worlds (the literate and the illiterate) coalescing, but then again my assumption wasn’t totally accurate, that dichotomy had (most probably) never been there.

What is that defines writing? — I asked myself — Is it just a record? Is it a pose? Is it the act of communication being objectified? Could it be the art of drawing commonly known abstract symbols with a shared meaning? I couldn’t make up my mind around a definition so I dropped the question for the moment being. But as the days passed and I roamed from the tropical south to the northern mountain ranges of the subcontinent, I kept recalling the Mumbai typists, and I realised that in the midst of the typist profession, writing arises as a collaborative process. For the writer was neither the women who dictated and provided the necessary information, neither the typist who shaped it into the document. The writer was being built as the conversation between them three took place; and as the feeling of the writer became present, so they wrote, together.

Extrapolating the collective to the individual, a dilemma arises in the temporary nature of that conversational writer compared to the permanent status of the writer as it’s commonly understood. If writing is a common space for the flash of creativity, illumination, subconscious mind, muse—you name it—, and the follow-up of ourselves as elements of understanding; then there’s no such thing as ‘I am a writer’, but people experiencing moments when they’re ‘being a writer’. That same time of writing that feels like no time at all, that rush, that flow, that presence, that something, is a key element of what the writer is; and to sustain it for a long time is incredibly difficult and none can do it forever. Therefore  — I considered— writers are writers, artists are artists, painters are painters, when they perform as such, when emotion drives a conversation between the unknown and the will to know. It doesn’t matter the outcome, the essence of writing is the truth behind that moment.

With enough luck and persistence maybe it’s possible to become a writer many times a day, or maybe once a day, or once a week. I strive to become a writer several times per month, but sometimes I feel I can hardly keep up with the pace of that conversation. So when I sit down to type, I remember those women and the typist and pray, and wish, that whatever it was that happened amongst them, comes around just for a brief moment and allows that great conversation between thoughts and craft to take place so that maybe, once everything is over and I lay back and look at how the writer has performed, I can borrow both the mesmerised look of the public and the enlightened grin of the artist.