Take Two: Reflections on Fame and Fortune

In 1999, Baby Halder, a young woman with three children, escaped her violent husband and fled from Kolkata to Delhi where, after a long struggle, she found employment as a domestic help in the house of a retired professor. Cooking, sweeping, cleaning, Baby discovered her employer's love for reading and he, in turn, encouraged and helped her desire to study and read.

Night, day, afternoon, evening, whenever Baby found a chink in her domestic duties, she would read, and then one day, she began two write. Her book-Alo Andhari in Bengali and Hindi, A Life Less Ordinary in English-became an international bestseller, changing Baby's life and that of her children.

In this, her second book, Baby, domestic worker and writer, reflects on how her life has changed since fortune and fame knocked at her door. She asks herself what the costs have been, and what the gains, she looks at what writing means to someone who inhabits the margins and for whom invisibility is a condition of life.