About Me
19, Harish Mukherjee road. There used to be a noisy straw shredding machine by the pavement. The inside opened to a courtyard and a two storied house. You were born here— my mother would tell me every time I would cross the pavement with her in an afternoon walk. Lazy afternoon walks with occasional shopping of household necessities was a pastime for me and mother.
Later,I have also been to the house where some of our relatives continued to live. In 1959, my parents shifted to a flat in the second floor of the Khirod ghosh market on Hazra road. With my brothers and parents, i lived there till 1979. That was our longest stay at any address after multiple house shiftings in the southern part of the city. My school was nearby — an old Bengali medium school called Beltala girls’ Higher Secondary school — a walking distance of three quarters of a kilometer from home.
My father was working with the Central Government as an Audit officer and my mother was a homemaker. She was an avid reader of contemporary and classical writing and used read out books to us, the children , in between her cooking spells in the kitchen. The brothers were older to me. After finishing school, they joined the Calcutta Medical college to become medical graduates.
When I was queueing up near Metro film theatre in 1971 to see Kolkata 71 by Mrinal sen, I did not know the legendary Sen stayed in a building very near our school. In 1973,I went to study Economics in Presidency college. Distance from home was longer. The bus route 2B would take us to college street direct. The other other option was to go to Esplanade and take a tram to college street. I would prefer a tram journey any day but it would take much longer. University was even further away. While most departments were housed in the Centenary building in College Street, next door to Presidency college, the department of Economics somehow broke away. It had started the masters classes in a building near the Emerald Bower Campus of the Rabindra Bharati University on BT Road. Journey to BT road by a double decker bus called L 20 which terminated at Barrackpore seemed eternal but also very enjoyable in company of friends.
I started writing rather early in life — it was not even writing in the earliest stage-because, before I could master alphabet, I would compose poems and recite them. It was my mother who took these down in a notebook. Later I was gifted a notebook and a pencil, many more after one was full. I would carry the notebook every where, to school, to the nearby park where I would go to play and keep it near my pillow. From standard two when i joined school, my poems would appear regularly in the school magazine. All three of us, two brothers and one sister, started subscribing to Sandesh , the children ‘s monthly edited by Satyajit Ray and Leela Majumdar some time in the mid nineteen sixties.We had a common subscription number 2598. My first poem in Sandesh was published in 1969. Thereafter from 1970-1074 the indulgent editors published all my poetry short prose and stories for children in rapid succession. In 2019, therefore, I have completed 50 years of writing, if I count 1969 as the first year! The Editors of Sandesh played a very major role in nurturing a young 12 year old girl in to a writer.
I joined the Indian Administrative service in 1980, after a brief period of training in the Indian Audit and Accounts Service , where I had joined in 1979, and got ready for a journey towards the Indian reality through my travels and work as a public servant. I was a poet and writer for children even before I joined the Civil Service. As I diversified my writing into several genres— short stories, novels, essays and of course more of poetry and children’s writing, my writing and work got intertwined, the writer and the civil servant getting locked in a tussle of identity and existence.
After over forty books and thirty seven years in public service, I am a full time writer now, writing, travelling and rediscovering India everyday.