Sheila Reddy Prabud Kumar, the grandson of the famous Indian writer Premchand and a professor of anthropology, found that the new maid in his family often meditated alone, so he prescribed the world's most An ancient cure: let her tell a story.She worked silently, scrubbing the floor, washing the dishes, cooking and mopping the floor, and then quietly went to get food for the children when she was done. The twenty-nine-year-old is not entirely new to storytelling, though.As a child, Bebe Halder used to lie beside her cousin, like Queen Scheherazade, and tell night after night a story she had heard from someone else.And she has no shortage of stories of her own to tell.For example, when her mother ran away from home when she was four years old, she gave her a ten paisa coin, and every time she fumbled for the coin in her hand, all she could think about was the story of her mother and younger brother who suddenly disappeared, or were they Family life in Kashmir - where her father was a soldier for several years.Even reading history textbooks reminds her of her mother involuntarily—the mother left with a child strapped to her back, disappearing from their lives forever, just like Queen Zhangxi.

But the notebook and pen that Prabold gave her gave her an inexplicable fear.For Bebe Halder, as for countless hominids, stories were supposed to be something casually told at bedtime, like fables, stories of animals, cunning or simple, of kings and queens, far removed from the heart of the world, Stay away from the myriad of things in life, but it has a great effect on purifying the soul.But her employer's advice was unusual. He said: "Write about your own life." Write about her own life! She lived in a daze, full of violence and abuse, dark and dull, but from time to time she summoned up courage and struggled desperately.What is there to say about such a life?She followed her retired driver father to many places, from Kashmir to Murshidabad and then to Singapore.First became a motherless child, had to endure a violent father and stepmother, and then married a cold and cruel husband who was fourteen years older than her.Until one day, she couldn't bear it anymore and boarded a train to Derry with her three children.In Derry, she joined thousands of women across the country who had fled impoverished and alcoholic husbands: working as poorly paid housemaids, sometimes with their children on the streets in sub-zero winter nights.

But Bebe was used to obedience, and took up the task assigned to her by her employer: struggling to write a few pages each day, as if it were just another chore in her busy day.It is really embarrassing to say that she has not written in a copybook for twenty years, and she has even forgotten how to spell it.Worse, even her children wondered why their mother wrote in a copybook when they didn't.However, it turned out that Prabold did have a discerning eye.The magic of words begins to work. Prabud was born to deal with words, lived by words, and took pleasure in words, so he understood the value of words.In fact, he noticed that Bebe was very slow in dusting the books, and immediately offered her to use his library.The first book she took off the shelf hesitantly was My Bengali Girlhood by Taslima Nasrin.There is no better book for beginners than this one, it's as if Bebe is reading her own life.In the book, the author expresses the anger and humiliation of a woman born in a poor society.These long-repressed emotions force Babe to board a train to an unknown end, and now seem to take on new meaning.

After the day's work, Bebe read non-stop when the children were in bed.Other novels such as Ashapuna Devi, Mahasitta Devi, and Bhudadeb Guha soon became her reading objects.The books were enough to stimulate Bebe out of her dullness and torpor, but reading alone wasn't enough to stimulate her to write.If Prabold, a writer who didn't dabble in writing until the 1960s, and his two close friends, Ashwauk Sekasalia and Ramesh Goswomi, hadn't encouraged her, Push her on, and Bebe may never realize her own gift for writing. (The English translation is "An Unusual Life") is a slim little book, from Bebe's childhood to her marriage at twelve years and eleven months, her sudden entrance into adult life, her vain Struggling, eking out a living with an illiterate, aloof husband, and raising three children alone, she finally boarded a train to Faridabad, near Delhi.The story concludes with her struggle to find a living and her accidental discovery of her writing talent.

This is an unusual book, written primarily in the first person but shifting to third-person narration at every moment of poignancy.Bebe seems to know instinctively that the only means of conveying these intense emotions is to distance herself from her own narrative.To Prabhat’s credit, when translating the Bengali manuscript into Hindi, he chose to intervene minimally, smoothing out the chaotic timing of the narrative and preserving Bebe’s original narrative voice.What is most remarkable about Bebe's unusual personal memoir is how she portrays herself: In just a few pages, Bebe transforms from a passive, resigned woman into a writer who can recreate her life through words. Those depressing and burning past events.

The memo, which deftly uses the form of a copybook, chronicles the family's life in Jammu, Kashmir and Dalhousie, where her father served as a soldier.Consciously or unconsciously, she described snowflakes, flowers on the mountain and even rainbows.But from the very beginning, it was obviously not the traditional little girl telling the story of beautiful flowers and rainbows, but an adult's reflection on the cruel reality. Bebe's family was taken to Murshidabad by his father, who then left, leaving them alone.Bebe described the predicament the family was facing with the flat, unsentimental tone typical of abused people.The four-year-old Bebe went through every detail, and the grown-up Bebe recorded their miserable life with children's candor: how her mother desperately maintained the family's expenses, couldn't let go of her pride and self-esteem, refused Going out of the house to work or relying on the charity of relatives, how to vent helplessness and frustration to the children; it describes how the father appeared occasionally, made a promise and then turned away, until finally he quit his job and returned home due to the pressure of the elders in the family.But the husband and father who came home were frowning and depressed, making the children avoid them.

The story that followed in the next few pages was just as Babe had remembered it over the years, raw and natural.Bebe's casual and prosaic narration makes it clear that she has no intention of understanding her ignorant childhood, which she has spent half her life trying to forget.The things she recorded calmly were even more terrifying because of their randomness.The mother left with the youngest child and left them without a word.The eldest sister married someone hastily.Babe was beaten by her father for honestly admitting there was no food in the house.She remembers the games she played at school, her older brother running away from home, her stepmother being abusive, her father going to Dhanbad to find a new job.Then we see her as a totally discriminating child, crying because she has no new clothes for Lord Shiva's day of worship.It seems that, given the paper and pen, and at the behest to write down her life, Bebe hastened to recreate her childhood afflictions and traumas with surgeon's precision and professional calm.

However, as the narrative progresses, Bebe's style shifts noticeably.We see her begin to write about events instead of just brushing them off: it's as if she hasn't confided these painful memories to anyone, not even herself, and now just needs her own words It will heal her wounds, and the past will never trouble her again. For example, when she was lying in the hospital at the age of eleven or twelve and receiving treatment for depression, her menarche came: "One morning, when I woke up, I found blood on the bed sheet, and I was so scared that I cried. In the hospital, the nurse heard the crying and ran to see what was going on. But I was too scared to speak. The nurse saw the bed sheet and asked me if this happened to me before. I replied no, She understood why I was scared like this. Some people gathered around me and smiled at me. Other patients also told me that there is nothing to worry about, and girls will grow up like this."

Bebe found herself thinking about what it meant to be physically mature: her father was suddenly paying attention to her needs, not even to her disrespect—otherwise, she would have been blamed.The boys in the neighborhood also began to see her in a new light. Bebe has grown confident and bold, and she can now stop and look at those around her.It was as if the words had helped her get rid of the past, and she now had the leisure to look around.Gone is the monotonous narrative tone, replaced by a new kind of tact.She paused to describe a classmate named Krishna: "She is short, fair-skinned, and has some jagged teeth, but she is still beautiful. Her sister Mani is also a lovely little girl." Bebe calmly Describing how she went to school with the beautiful, smiling sisters: "The three of us took tutoring classes together. I remember, one day the power went out, and we lit an alcohol lamp and continued studying. I moved the lamp, The hot glass lampshade fell on the teacher's lap. I was terrified, thinking that the teacher would tell my father and I would be beaten again. But the teacher didn't do that at all. He didn't say anything. Although the teacher didn't Seriously, but Krishna and Mani keep teasing me about it." In the first few pages, Bebe would jump from one thing to another unrelated thing.However, she was able to connect several things now, and guessed that the two sisters must have mentioned it to their father, which was why the father of the two sisters had advised Bebe's father not to be too strict with the children.

Bebe narrates without an iota of self-pity, veering gently into her own, agreeing with the sisters' father that her childhood ended the day her mother left. "Dad won't let me wear bracelets, talk to people, play with people, or even go out of the house. I'm too afraid of getting beaten, so I only look for opportunities to sneak out when I'm sure my dad is away and can't catch me. I was only eleven or twelve years old at the time, but at that time I often thought, no one is as miserable as I am? I often think that only I know what it feels like to lose my mother. Sometimes when I think about my mother, I think, if I leave Maybe it’s not so bad if it’s Dad and not Mom. What else has Dad given us but fear?”

However, Bebe's father isn't a downright scary figure.Babe's words became more fluent, and gradually lost her original innocence. In her narrative, Dad gradually became a complex person: grumpy, emotional, sometimes loving, and even surprisingly gentle. From about a third of the way through the book, Bebe has grown into a full-fledged writer who can go off topic at will to discuss other topics, sometimes lively and playful, sometimes contemplative, and then return to the topic methodically like a mature writer come up.It is obvious how far Bebe has come from the opening pages to the present.