Ajay Kumar

What was your favorite book as a child?

I didn’t grow up reading many books. But I liked encyclopedias which gave words and vision to my curiosity. An occasional Tinkle from the railway station. Or a book issued from the school library on the rare occasions they let us in. Like RL Stine’s Give Yourself Goosebumps series which fascinated me for its Choose Your Own Adventure technique. But the one book I remember fondly is The Science of Oceans by ANP Ummerkutty. It was a typical pop science book that I received as a prize in school but it felt so magical. Perhaps because it was beyond my reading level at the time, there were words that I didn’t know how to pronounce, let alone know what they meant. Sentences slithered away through my arms. Meaning eluded my grasp like the strange aquatic creatures the chapters described. Though the book was meant to introduce me to the science of oceans, it ended up dunking me into the oceanic depths of language, and I came out swimming.

What was the original reason or motivation why you started writing creatively?

It is impossible to locate the original reason, at least for me. But I can think of how I started writing. Writing hypothetical episodes of cartoons I watched on TV, like Pokémon, Ben 10, or The Hulk. The first long story I wrote was an adaptation of a computer game called Island Castaway. My first poem was written at my grandparents’ house in my native village in Kanyakumari, during a heavy rain, when people ran for shelter while the trees seemed to be dancing in joy. It was titled “Perspective” and its last couplet is still etched in my heart: “When tiny droplets bounce off my leaves, / The joy I get never seems to cease.” I sense a pattern here of being a medium between mediums. Perhaps a why lies hidden among these hows.

What was the most adventurous or thrilling thing you ever did/experienced?

As cliché as this might be: Love.

Do you listen to music while reading or writing? Why/why not?

Almost never. The rhythm of language is very important to me, whether in prose or poetry, and I feel like any music will skew it somehow. But I do listen to ambient sounds when I need to focus or drown out the noise.