Coming of age with Mrs Dalloway in Karachi

NEVER DOES ONE feel so in alliance with Virginia Woolf – “[Words] are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things” – as when one decides to string together a couple hundred sentences in ode to a book that seems to weigh upon one as much as a human life. Suddenly, all the words that have ailed, even sickened their host mind for a pile of years evacuate their home. Suddenly, all the sentences that sounded worthy of formulation are loose and useless and entirely forgettable, so much so that one is left sitting, perhaps cross-legged on the floor in the sun, perhaps on a swivelling office chair in a faux wooden study, staring intently at one’s fingernails, choosing which one to bite next. It seems to one, then, that the price of words is fingernails, plain as day. 

Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway was first published on 14 May 1925. That makes it a hundred years ago today when Clarissa Dalloway plunged into a fresh, calm, fictional London morning with a singular mind, to buy flowers for a party she was to throw that night in honour of her brilliant husband, Richard. Clarissa, who started off as Lettice in Woolf’s 1915 debut novel, The Voyage Out, struck out on this walk for the very first time in 1923, as the protagonist of her creator’s short story ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, to buy not flowers but gloves. Unbeknown to her, she would go on to walk the streets of her beloved London millions of times for millions of readers, making the same turns, adoring the same sights. While she is introduced by her first name by the fourth sentence of the book, like Woolf herself she would always be remembered by her husband’s name.