Women can have an active writing life even within the space of the domestic

There is a way in which we take for granted the need for both space and solitude as preconditions to writing. However, there is the danger of taking her too literally, of assuming that without independent means, without a room of one’s own, women cannot aspire to a writing life. In a piece titled ‘About My Writing’, translated from Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana, she writes: “Especially in the mango season there was not a second to spare. Vaidehi goes on to describe the ways in which she navigates her writing life — in and through rather than in opposition to — the space of the domestic. When she speaks of what matters most to her as a writer, she looks to the kitchen: “It’s a word I used to hear from my mother: ‘hada’, meaning ‘balance’… While chopping vegetables in the kitchen, while adding each spice, while checking how much cooking each dish required, and how much seasoning — if the ‘balance’ slipped it was a job badly done.