The Lounge Chair Interview: 10 Questions with Indu K. Mallah

By Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Why do you write?

Writing is my svadharma, my inscape. It is a twin trajectory for me to express all the churning ideas and feelings within me to make a coherent statement, and to strike a chord in the hearts and minds of kindred spirits.

Tell us about your most recent book project. What were you trying to say or achieve with it?

My most recent book is a collection of poems entitled B(r)oken  Moon and Other Poems, published by Authorspress. It is a collection I have been working on for years, and it has the same objectives I have mentioned above. I have quoted a verse by Ralph Nazareth which gives a further insight into my objective:

“I’ve seen

Glass-blowers

Stretch little

Into much.

Such is my hope

For words—

Blowing syllables up

To hold a world

Close to breaking.”

Describe your writing aesthetic.

I think I’ve described my writing aesthetic in one of the sections in my collection, which I have captioned “As leaves to a tree.” Sometimes the germ of inspiration is a seed that lies dormant in the sub-soil for months, which sprouts suddenly one day; at others it is a flash of lightning; at yet others, it is a jigsaw puzzle,  the pieces teasing, tantalizing, with the final piece refusing to fit in till the last euphoric moment, and sometimes it comes from my womb, with all the pangs of childbirth. At the practical level, I need to sit at my writing-desk with my thesaurus at hand, and I make a ‘heap’ of all the associations that the poem, book, article evokes in me, and as I go about my other duties, my subconscious takes over. I then make a rough plan of my writing project, and again leave it. I finally hone it into shape. I always write my first draft in a large notebook, with a Mont Blanc pen, and later transfer it onto the computer. I must mention that alliteration is second nature to me.