Indian Writing

Siddhartha’s post at Sepia Mutiny, and KM’s post here reminded me that I haven’t posted my review of Baby Halder’s affecting memoir, A Life Less Ordinary, which was published in a slightly edited version in Time Out. It’s an incredible book, please read it.

*****

In the first paragraph of her memoir, Baby Halder writes about the happiest period of her childhood when she lived with her parents and siblings as one family in Kashmir and Dalhousie. This idyll doesn’t last. The family soon finds itself left in Murshidabad by a father who appears at unpredictably long intervals. Eventually the mother walks out one morning, carrying her little son on her hip. Baby remembers her as a heroic, tragic Rani of Jhansi – but elsewhere she puts words to the bitter pain of a little girl abandoned by her mother.

Baby wants desperately to study, but she is married off and has a baby before she is fourteen. In matter-of-fact tones, she describes how her husband beats her first with a stone and then a block of wood - causing her to miscarry. “I felt as if something inside me was slipping out of my body.”

Incredibly, she goes back to him. Things get worse, but she tries to push on for the sake of her children. It is only after three children, when she absolutely cannot endure herhusband’s violence any longer, that she leaves – another Rani of Jhansi setting out to struggle for her freedom – but she takes her three children with her.

A sweet stroke of destiny brings her to work in the Delhi home of former academic Prabodh Kumar, the grandson of Premchand. From his bookshelves she reads Taslima Nasreen’s Amar Meybela (My Girlhood), Ashapurna Devi, Mahasweta Devi, and more. This memoir is the result of Kumar’s suggestion to Baby that she should write her life story.

A wise suggestion. For Baby’s story not only heals her but becomes a classic subaltern autobiography for our times. There is so sense of victimhood here, only raw courage - and occasionally a pang, a moment of sadness that things might have been otherwise. The narration of her first childbirth is viscerally painful to read, even though she narrates it in the third-person. She adopts this device elsewhere in the narrative; at other moments she speaks in the first person. At every step, her story takes us on a personal journey through the India of the underprivileged Indian woman. We see the geography of the small-town slum; the blazing solidarity of women; the public hospitals with their basic facilities and rare, awkward kindnesses; the long journey in the unreserved train compartment to Delhi; and once there, the search for work and a place to stay as a single mother.

First published in Bengali as Aalo Aandhari, the memoir has been sensitively translated into English by Urvashi Butalia. A Life Less Ordinary is not only the remarkable story of one woman’s courage - it also speaks for millions of brave Indian women who endure poverty, violence and heartbreak every day of their lives.