Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

A life less ordinary

This is no literary work of genius but Baby Halder's book is both a societal and literary fence-breaker

REACHING OUT Baby Halder Photo: R.V. Moorthy

Her smile is certainly eye-catching. And those eyes! Glowing and expressive. But that striking smile, those iridescent eyes can't be trusted fully. Because they are half way to her truth. They tell you that she is indeed at ease with life now. But what they hold back is her past. They don't tell you the full truth.

Baby Halder, as she begins talking about her life as she has penned in her debut book, `Aalo Aandhari', a memoir now translated into English, words gradually begin to ice-over, almost to the extent of numbing your senses. All you could manage to think is, how violence, when it becomes an everyday situation can make people stop reacting the way many others do.

Baby, a domestic help in a Gurgaon household, begins narrating shards of her life led in various parts of West Bengal, mainly Murshidabad, in almost the same flat tone as in her book: "Where should I start? Should I begin with how when I was seven-years-old my mother suddenly left us by thrusting a coin each in our hands, or tell you about how my nephew told my Baba that he saw his father strangling his mother, my Didi, to death, or how my Baba used to suddenly vanish from our life and then resurface. Or should I tell you about my husband to whom I was married off when I was 12 and why I left him and came to Delhi with my three children?"

The birth

Instead of choosing from the options that Baby has offered to talk, one begins by asking her about how the book was born. "My employer Prabodh ji has lots of books, including many Bengali books. While dusting them, I always used to think if one day I could read them. Even as a child, I always wanted to go to school. Despite our poverty, my mother never stopped us from going to school and even after she left us, I continued going. I studied till class 7. So when Prabodh ji once saw me a little lost while dusting the books he asked me whether I would like to read a Bengali book, to which I said yes. He gave me Taslima Nasreen's autobiography and soon I realised her life is so similar to me," she narrates.

Not stopping at Nasreen, Baby soon picked books by Mahasweta Devi, Shanko Ghosh, Charat Chandra Bangopadhay, Rabindranath Tagore, Ashapurna Devi, Nasrul Islam and more such Bengali luminaries.

That destiny dropped her at that household in Gurgaon one hot afternoon seven years back can't be denied completely as her employer is no other than Prabodh Kumar, the grandson of the great writer Premchand. Himself a writer and a retired professor, Kumar gave her a notebook and a pen one day to try writing whatever comes to her mind. "I became very confused. I told him, I don't know what to write and then he said, why don't you write about yourself. And so I began writing," Baby relates.

The world of words

And what happened thereafter is indeed history. From a faceless domestic help, Baby became a writer. From her sufferings she suddenly broke free to enter a new world of words. "After seeing what I wrote, Prabodh ji said, someone called Annie Frank had once written something like that. On hearing that, I felt quite good," she says. Prabodh Kumar translated her memoirs, `Aalo Aandhari' into Hindi and got it published by a Kolkata-based publisher in 2002. In 2004 came her Bengali original by the same publisher.

A year after, a Malayalam translation appeared and this past week came its English translation `A Life Less Ordinary' by Urvashi Butalia of the imprint, Zubaan. It is a Penguin and Zubaan publication.

Urvashi says, "She is not always flat in her tone in the book. She has her literary moments and from first person she at times goes to third person." Very soon, Urvashi informs, Baby's book shall be translated in French too.

Baby is writing yet another book too. More than happy at the moment, Baby thinks the great purpose that her book has served is changing her father's attitude not just towards her alone but towards daughters in general. "He said nobody in our family has gone so far in life and that makes me feel very good. When Baba once told me that if time would have allowed him, he would like to go back to the days when we were kids and undo all the wrongs that he did towards us and my mother, I felt very good," she recounts.

For a girl who doesn't know even her birthday, isn't it a great gift from a father?

SANGEETA BAROOAH PISHAROTY

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail