"I am a domestic help, not a writer," said Halder, who has two best-selling books to her credit and first shot to fame in 2006, with her work A Life Less Ordinary.
For the past 14 years, Halder has been working as a maid at the house of Prabodh Kumar in Gurgaon, where she lives in a temporary house on the terrace.
Kumar, 80, her employer, is not only her employer, but also her literary mentor and translator.
"When she started working at my house, she had enormous interest in books. She would pick Bengali books from the bookshelf and avidly read them. As I interacted with her, I realised that she had a story that needed to be told," said Kumar, a retired professor of Anthropology.
Halder had a motherless childhood and an abusive father. Her step-mother married her off at the tender age of 13 years to a man twice her age. She was raped on her wedding night.
Fed up with her abusive husband, she boarded a train from Durgapur in West Bengal for Delhi, where she started working as a maid at a house. She, however, soon left the house after her employers started mistreating her. Soon, she found work at Prabodh Kumar's house and life took a turn for the better.
One day, Kumar handed Halder a pen and asked her to write her story in her mother tongue, Bengali.
Full article in the link below.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/a-bestselling-author-she-works-as-a-domestic-help-in-gurgaon/article1-1169444.aspx
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