At twenty-six, I left my job as head of marketing at a consulting firm to get an MFA and to commit to writing and teaching. Soon after, several submerged memories resurfaced.
In sixth grade in boarding school in India, I wrote a novella after reading Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage.” In it, I confused the terms “picket line” and “no man’s land.” My Confederate and Union soldiers were on opposite sides of a “picket line” but really I meant a barbed-wire fence.
Even before that, I wrote a fifty-page fan-fiction inspired by Brian Jacques’ Redwall series (a series that anthropomorphizes animals) and sent it to him. It contained lengthy sections of walrus communication, strings of ‘oooooo’s and ‘aaaaaaa’s. Understandably, he never wrote back.
In my teenage years, I decided that aspiring to be a writer was shameful, juvenile, imbecilic, unrealistic; I started to tell people I wanted to be an investment banker. If you detect a symptom of our current society-wide dysfunction in that substitution, I’m willing to serve as its exponent. These memories, not serving the image of respectability I wished to project, retreated, and began the long wait for me to get over myself.
At the University of Chicago, I began my studies in economics. Without quite realizing it, I filled my course load with Shakespeare, Rushdie, Joyce, Medieval English, everything except financial accounting. It was as if my prefrontal cortex directed me towards the norm, but something within me, my soul, kept course-correcting, saying, “This is what you want, man. The sooner you realize and accept it, the less inner turmoil you’ll experience.”
Ultimately, it took another eight years for me to cop to having always been a writer. Those eight years furnished the ideas that you see in this story, ‘Intermediaries’: information asymmetry, asymmetries of wealth and access and historical injustice, and ubiquitous complicity in these asymmetries. I wonder often about the relationship between individual action and systemic change. It is fast becoming the central question of our times unless you subscribe to the view that it is the central question at all times.
But we live in an age of information saturation. Does the world really need another idiot to call themselves a writer and subject other people to their thoughts? In the memories of my earliest literary fumblings, that question never arose; the act itself had meaning. It didn’t need to justify itself.
It’s been hard, in a culture so committed to external valuation, to write in the spirit of outcome-independence. But if we interrogate each action with, “is this bringing about systemic change?”, we will always feel inadequate. In the pursuits of childhood, there is only the action, not the consequence. It’s living, as opposed to living for something.
No one is banging on my door saying, “How dare you write this stuff? You should be doing something else!” But, if they were, this is what I’d tell them.
Editor’s Note: Raghev Rao’s story “Intermediaries” appears today in Litbreak Magazine.
