Writer Unblocked: A friend who brought back words into my life

 SOME FRIENDSHIPS BEGIN with ceremony. Others begin across a dinner table and quietly grow into forces that alter the course of a life.

My friendship with Shashi Tharoor began that way nearly 25 years ago in Manhattan. My partner Charlie and I were living by City Hall in the Financial District when Shashi came for a vegetarian dinner with his twin sons, Ishan and Kanishk, who were turning 16. Our friend Ramu Damodaran joined us. Six people around a table, a simple meal, and conversation that moved easily from books to politics to family.

What struck me immediately was Shashi’s curiosity. He listens the way most people speak—attentively and generously. The boys were bright and mischievous in the way 16-year-olds are meant to be, and their father watched them with unmistakable pride.

That evening began a friendship that would slowly entwine our families and, in ways I could not have imagined then, reshape my own life.

Years later he came again to dinner, this time at my mother’s home in South Extension in New Delhi, again around a vegetarian table. But my life then was very different.

I was legally blind.

The world had blurred into suggestion and shadow. I navigated through instinct and memory more than sight. To compensate, I used my phone as a prosthetic eye— photographing where I stood, enlarging the images, and writing reflections about what I sensed around me.

Shashi noticed. “What is he doing?” he asked my mother.

She explained my strange system—photographs first, sight later, thoughts scribbled afterward.

Shashi paused. “That,” he said quietly, “would make a terrific book.”

From that moment came Instamatic, my book of images and reflections from that fragile period. The idea was entirely his. My friend, Yogi Suri, at MILAP embraced it and made the book possible.

But what Shashi really did was bring words back into my life.

My column ‘Slice of Life’ began in Mail Today under the India Today group before moving to the Indian Express. I later began writing ‘Soft Boil’ for Open and a weekly book review column, ‘The Aftertaste’, every Thursday in the Indian Express. Today I write across several platforms—Hello, ANI News, Robb Report, and Hospitality Horizon.

I also write a fortnightly column in Hindi for Dainik Jagran, not in translation but in the Hindustani I grew up speaking—that braid of Urdu and Hindi the editors say feels rare today. That confidence too came from Shashi.

In total, I now write more than 19 columns a month. People sometimes ask how that happened.

The answer is simple: Shashi Tharoor.

Not because he handed me anything easily, but because he insisted writing was not only possible for me—it was necessary. He reads what I write, shares it, critiques it and pushes me towards honesty.

When I hesitated to speak publicly about being gay, he told me gently but firmly: “Tell your story. Someone out there needs to hear it.”

That courage shaped my memoir, Tell My Mother I Like Boys, released this January at the Jaipur Literature Festival.

The public knows Shashi Tharoor the parliamentarian, diplomat and author whose books widened the intellectual map of modern India. I know another Shashi—the one who believes words are bridges, not weapons, and who sees possibility where others see fragility.

As Shashi turns 70, I think less about the books he has written than the lives he has quietly changed. Mine is one of them.

Every column I write carries an echo of that dinner-table moment when he looked at a struggling writer and saw not limitation, but possibility. And then simply said: write.

May he have many more decades to keep enlarging India’s story, illuminating minds, and transforming lives with the power of words.