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Writing Life

This blog post about a woman's dream of being a writer coming true at last was a nice read. The first success at forty eight implies the person has the resilience to recover from rejection combined with faith in her dream. Reading this reminded me of one of our neighbors when I was growing up in India. The woman was friendly and I would often see her and my mother chatting across the fence. Her father-in-law lived with them. 

His wife had passed many decades ago. The old man was generally peaceful and kept to himself but did not get along with his son. It was known that he wrote things in his notebook - in fact there were several such notebooks. They were considered private and off-limits and no one knew what the contents were. She suspected he wrote the words he would have said to his son if their relationship had been different. That theory made sense to outsiders like us who were aware of the strained father-son relationship. No one had ever seen them exchange a word. He was fine with the daughter-in-law and the two grand-kids. 

My father retired and my parents moved to Kolkata. A few years later our former neighbor called my mother to share some interesting news. The father-in-law had passed and the family had finally seen the mysterious notebooks he always kept locked in his almirah. They were no letters to his son or any thoughts about his fraught relationship with the family. Instead they were a set of sci-fi stories set in a distant planet with a cast of characters that did not bear any resemblance to people the deceased or his survivors had known. 

The curmudgeonly old man was suddenly viewed in new light by one and all. An aspiring sci-fi writer in our midst the whole time and we had no clue. My mother our former neighbor asked her what she thought of the quality of the writing and the woman said it was not half-bad. Everyone who had read the notebooks had enjoyed the experience. The same could not be said of their experience interacting with the author when he was alive. He was not a social or friendly creature and people knew to stay out of his way. There was some talk for trying to get notebooks published but I don't recall if that ever came to pass. 

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