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Journalism of Courage
A LOT HAPPENS IN THIS BOOK, like it does in its writer’s life. A Life Less Ordi-nary is not so much about the mean-ing of life or the angst of living. It is about liv-ing. It is the journey of a woman who leaves her familiar though cruel surroundings not for any adventure but in search of an ordinary life. But what Baby Halder ended up with is something quite extraordinary.
When Halder became a domestic worker in the Gurgaon home of Prabodh Kumar, a former professor and grandson of Premc-hand, she was happy to find work in a house that treated her so well. As she dusted his book-lined shelves, she frequently lingered over the Bangla titles. Can you read at all, one day Kumar asked her. “I won’t lie,” Halder replied, “but what I know is like knowing nothing.” Halder had studied “till about sixth or seventh” but could name among her favourite writers Tagore, Kazi Nasrul Islam, Sharatchandra, Satyendra Nath Dutt, Suku-mar Rai. Kumar gave her a diary, a pen and an instruction: Write.
The result was Aalo-Aandhari—translated now into English as A Life Less Ordinary. The storyline is fairly simple. Baby Halder spent the first four years “somewhere” in Jammu and Kashmir before her father left them in Murshidabad. Her mother put up with his long absences before walking out one day with her youngest son. The only thing Halder’s mother left her to remember her by was a ten paise coin she pressed into her palm the day she left.
Baby is married before she touches thir-teen and becomes a mother by 14. But it’s not all unrelieved gloom. There are moments of happiness that children and the young have a gift for creating. Baby’s occasional stays with her maternal aunt, telling stories to her cousin late into the night, her long chats with her neighbour Sandhya, a gulli-danda game with the neighbourhood boys, are all mo-ments of fleeting pleasure. When these be-come too few and infrequent, she plots her great escape. The escape from a violent mar-riage to the unknown sprawl of a city.
Clutching her children and a slip of paper with the address of her brother, she arrives at Delhi. The enormity of her decision hits her as she tries to get directions. “Where had I come? What would I do now? Where will I go with the children?” At the end of the novel, her questions have found happy answers, though after much struggle.
In her journey, Baby Halder is often left alone by relatives. But it is the small kind-nesses of strangers that pull her through. These warm strains are a spot of hope in a novel that essentially records the growing pains of a young girl.
There are few spectacular turns of phrase in A Life Less Ordinary, nor is this a story that comes laded with sudden twists and spectacu-lar surprises. The story and its lines are sim-ple.
And in that lies its triumph. To tell a story simply and still be rivetting is an art. And Halder has it.
