Why I Write: To Taste Life Twice

As I started thinking about why I write, I found myself reflecting on when I first started writing. My mind went to 1974 when I was about 13 years old. My father, a colonel in the Pakistani army, had recently returned to Pakistan after having been a prisoner of war in India for 3 years after the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war. My first act of creative writing was poetic, and it was in English, which was not my mother tongue. My first poem was titled “Teenage.” It described the passion and boldness in the heart of a young teenager, the constraints of society, and the wish to rebel against them. The poems that followed were about the beauty of nature, wild imaginings, and questions about the scenes and sights around me. Fortunately, or unfortunately, somewhere along the way, I lost those early poems, but in writing this, some lines from one of those poems come to mind:

I had turned to nature to find solace for the pain I was in. The surroundings I lived in then made it easy to do that. After my father's return from India, he resigned from the army, and my parents built a simple, lovely home in the hills of Abbottabad, Pakistan, overlooking the valley below. We lived surrounded by picturesque hills with lovely trails winding through them, mountains with waterfalls at almost every turn, lush valleys, and an amazing array of colors in the landscape as the seasons changed.

Over the next year, I wrote poems about the horrors of war, and then gradually, I started writing poems about love, passion, and desire. I was

still writing in English, and my