has been inwardly disturbed by it. The well-known saying that you can take a horse to the river-brink but you cannot force him to drink holds good in the case of writing also. In the Coffee House, whenever an enthusiast dilates upon his plans for a novel, scene by scene and chapter by chapter, we begin to have a lurking suspicion that the novel will never see the light of day. He is too sure about everything; besides, he is letting off steam, which, if kept inside, might propel his pen to better advantage. In .his enthusiasm he is forging a framework in his mind which becomes more rigid the more he talks about it, and this may prove to be an insurmountable obstacle when he actually sits down to write. It is better if things are left undefined before writing, or are not too sharply defined, for this gives a better fliance to one's own creative impulse to do its work as best it can. Some inner compulsion, no doubt, comes into play, but it is not the compulsion of performing a duty or discharging a spcial obligation or fulfilling a plan. I shall try to recapitulate some of my experiences wnh my novel Tamas. The novel deals with the communal riots which took place on the eve of partition in my home-town, far back in 1947, and I had sat down to write the novel nearly twenty five years after the events described in had taken place. I do not clearly remember in what state of mind I commenced the novel. All that I had, as raw material, was a jumble of memories and some inner sense of unease. There wasn^ any plan in my mind. The events described in the novel cover a period of five days. But when I began to write, this specific period was nowhere in my mind. Frankly speaking, it suggested itself only when I was writing the last but one chapter. An incident can occur, utterly unforeseen, just on the spur of the moment and decide many things. In that chapter, while fighting was still going on between the two communities an army aeroplane appeared in the sky, flying low over the burning villages, with a British pilot in the cockpit. This was an occurrence which was neither preplanned nor based on fact. People inside the Gurdwara were feeling exhausted, their ammunition was finished, wjrile the Muslims in the same village had received fresh supplies of cartridges from a neighbouring town. I could not possibly go on with the account of fighting — details were becoming repetitive and taking too much space. Many of their women had already jumped into the well, quite a few deaths had been described, as also burning houses. Then appeared the aeroplane and it solved my problem. It suggested a turn in the narrative and also gave it a design. The turn took place on the fifth day of the riots. How did the aeroplane appear? Its appearance was unforeseen — and yet, not entirely unforeseen. Before the riots had started, a delegation of citizens, comprising members of all communities had waited on the'Deputy Commissioner, an Englishman, ancf 36 Journal of Arts and Ideas