Letter from Lake Como

Hawthornden Foundation Residency at Casa Ecco

I’m filing a report exactly halfway through my writing residency at Hawthornden Foundation’s Casa Ecco on Lake Como. At the start of each day I make a drawing and then settle down to write; on some days, I’ve also conducted interviews by Zoom with people in India. When I came here after a brief period of travel through Bengal, I was anxious to finish work on a small-book project. I have done that! My book entitled The Social Life of Indian Trains: A Journey will appear in January next year in Aleph’s short-book series called ‘Essential India.’ A lot of the thinking and writing on that train book is a part of a much larger, longer, more ambitious nonfiction project on India. That is the main work I have come to do here.

If you are still reading this, you might also remember reading my post entitled “Dear Diana” a little over a month ago. The post was addressed to my editor at Knopf but I was also trying to drive pegs into the ground so as to put up my tent for the night. What books would I keep in mind as I set about my travels? And then during my writing? How to give myself courage? And focus!

It has been easy to tackle questions of creativity, and, indeed, to plunge on ahead, because our whole cohort of eight writers is being very well taken care of here. The staff is amazing, the views are priceless, and the food—oh, the food! I had managed to neglect my body in the preceding months while I was teaching during the Spring semester but here I’ve been playing tennis—although I managed to pull my hamstring, I have returned to the court. The body is falling apart, of course, but I feel good. I’m enormously lucky and honored to be here. During our first week here our group even managed to climb up to the small San Martino church perched on the side of the mountain that looms behind Casa Ecco. There were many moments during the climb when I felt I couldn’t go on, but I did, and perhaps the writing of every new book is also like that.

Can you spot the church in my journal-drawing below?

I started work on this India project in the summer of 2022; the first piece I wrote for the book was published in Granta magazine under the title “Many Words for Heat, Many Words for Hate.” And then two or three other pieces again for the same magazine. (Luke Neima, are you reading this?) Seeking a language and form for my explorations, I published another piece in Brick magazine. The piece in Brick was about my trip along the Ganges. More recently, I traveled on the Himsagar Express from Kashmir to Kanyakumari for the New Yorker magazine. By the time I undertook that trip, the whole project had become clearer in my mind. But that is still not a book. My attempt here at Casa Ecco is to gather all those other stories I have been working on during the past few years (no, the past few decades!) and give shape to a new narrative about India then and India now.

Half of the residency is now over.

Is there enough time left to complete a draft?

It seeems a bit unlikely but I will try. I will stick to the routine of daily drawing and writing. I want to walk alone up a section of the mountain each day in order to build the bodily strength that I find waning. Whether it is writing or climbing a mountain, I must remember the words of the master!

Once again, I ask you to wish me luck!