I Was Living Someone Else's Dream Career and It Took a Stranger to Show Me

My father had been an engineer at a public sector company in Nagpur for thirty years and had built that career with a particular pride that I had absorbed as a child in the way of children who are close to a parent they admire.

When I showed aptitude for mathematics and science, the trajectory felt natural to everyone in the family, including me. I pursued engineering, performed well, and entered a respected manufacturing firm at 23 with the feeling of someone who has arrived at a destination that was always understood to be the destination.

For four years I was competent, well-regarded, and unable to identify any specific problem with my professional life while also unable to feel any particular investment in it. The work was not bad. It was simply not mine in any way I had ever examined.

The stranger who clarified this was a writer I met at a wedding in Nagpur when I was 27. We sat next to each other at dinner and he asked what I did, and then, with the easy curiosity of someone who asks questions for a living, what I would do if the engineering role did not exist.

The question caught me at a moment of reduced defensiveness and I answered honestly before I had composed anything: I would write. Not write engineering reports, which I did and which required a precision I appreciated. Write about people and what drove them. The answer surprised me because it was so immediate.

I had not planned to say it. It had arrived from somewhere below the deliberate thinking and landed between us with a clarity that I spent several weeks trying to explain away. The explaining away did not work because the answer kept being true every time I tested it privately.

At 29, I began writing in the evenings, then the early mornings, then with increasing seriousness about whether the evenings and mornings were telling me something that the job I had inherited from my father's aspirations could not. I am still an engineer. I am also a working writer.

I am no longer confused about which one feels like mine.