Baby Halder's journey from a child bride and housemaid to a celebrated author is a testament to resilience. Overcoming an abusive childhood and oppressive marriage, she found her voice through writing, with her memoir 'Aalo Aandhari' gaining international acclaim and shedding light on the struggles of domestic workers.
LIFE CERTAINLY WASN'T KIND to Baby Halder, to say the least. Left without a mother at the age of 4, she grew up in the care of her abusive and alcoholic father and a passive step-mother. From there, life became a series of hurdles to survive rather than overcome. Baby became a child bride at 12, married to a man 14 years her senior, and a mother of three by the time she was 16. Her days were marked not in childhood milestones but in chores, beatings, and responsibilities no child should have to carry.
Yet she refused to submit herself to fate. Decades later, with nothing but a notebook, a pen, and a story she almost didn't think was worth telling, Baby Halder (born 1973) stitched together a life less than ordinary. She penned her memoir, Aalo Aandhari, which gained both domestic and international praise and launched Baby from a domestic worker to a best-selling author.
This is the story of Baby Halder.
Baby Halder was born in 1973 in Kashmir in a lower-middle class family. When she was four years old, her father’s alcoholic and abusive behavior forced her mother to abandon her. She was entrusted into the care of her negligent father and a passive stepmother. She grew into an adult before childhood was over, Baby would remark years later during an interview given to The Hindu.
Baby primarily grew up in Murshidabad and then in Durgapur in West Bengal. Her sporadic moments of peace and happiness came when she would go to school, but that too came to a halt when she was married off to a man twice her age when she was 12 years old.
At the age when her classmates were playing and immersed in the innocent tendencies of childhood, Baby was entrusted with responsibilities after responsibilities: first as a wife, then as a maid of her husband, and then as a young mother. Just a year after her marriage, Baby had her first child, a boy named Subodh, at the age of 13 years.
Her marriage was a violent one, marred with violence on her very first day as a bride. Her two other children were born in quick succession. By the age of 25, Baby was burdened with more responsibilities than any other woman her age had to deal with.
In 1999, Baby came to a decision: she escaped her marital home with her children in tow in the dark cover of the night. With no concrete plan as to how she would survive on her own, Baby boarded a train to Delhi. Therein, she took up the only job someone like her — a school drop-out and a single mother of three — could take up: domestic work.
For years, Baby worked as a housemaid in several houses in the Delhi-NCR region. This proved to be another challenge in her life, as she was left at the mercy of several exploitative employers who looked down on her because of her being a single mother and her job as a housemaid.
Baby’s life took a turn when was employed by writer and retired anthropology professor Prabodh Kumar, who was a grandson of renowned Hindi writer Munshi Premchand. Kumar lived in Gurgaon, near New Delhi. For four years, Baby would quietly finish off her chores in his house without uttering a word or getting in the professor’s way. However, her interest in books, evident by her longing gaze towards the professor’s bookshelves and the more-than-required time she would take dusting it, didn't go unnoticed by Kumar.
Professor Kumar encouraged her to begin reading works by established authors. One of the first books he introduced her to was Taslima Nasreen’s autobiographical Amar Meyebela (My Girlhood), which describes the author’s troubled childhood and her anger at being born a woman in a poor society. The book had a profound impact on Baby and became an important turning point in her life. She soon developed a strong interest in reading and began exploring works by several other authors.
Before leaving for a month-long trip to South India, Kumar replaced the broom in Baby’s hand with a pen and told her: write. But Baby was plagued by this question: write what? She thought of her life as a seemingly ordinary one, devoid of any grand tale of accomplishments and achievements she could talk about in her writing. But eventually she realized that her life was her own, and her experiences and struggles were worth writing about.
Armed with a notebook and pen and with the Professor’s encouragement, Baby began recording her life story. She wrote mostly late at night after finishing her household duties and sometimes between chores. Using simple, direct language, she wrote her account in her mother tongue, Bengali. By the time Kumar returned a month later, Halder had already completed around 100 pages. Several months later, she finished the memoir, and thus was born her first novel: Aalo Aandhari, meaning light in the darkness.
In Aalo Aandhari, Baby chronicles her life in excruciating details, beginning with her as a child bride and the exploitative behavior she endured as a housemaid at the hands of her previous employers. Her story was a grand tale of survival, resilience, and self-discovery against structural oppression.
Professor Kumar played an essential role in getting Baby’s book published. He helped in refining the first draft of her manuscript and introduced it to literary circles in the area. He also translated the work into Hindi, which was published in 2002 by Kolkata-based small publishing house Roshani Publishers. The memoir attracted media attention for documenting the difficult lives of domestic workers in Asia and went through two additional editions within two years.
The original Bengali version, Aalo Aandhari, was published in 2004. A Malayalam translation followed in 2005, while the English edition, titled “A Life Less Ordinary” was translated by feminist author Urvashi Butali and released in 2006 and became a bestseller in India. The novel also received widespread international acclaim, with the The New York Times comparing the memoir to Angela’s Ashes, the 1996 memoir by Irish-American author Frank McCourt that recounts his impoverished and challenging childhood.
Aalo Aandhari was eventually translated into 21 languages, including 13 foreign languages such as French, Japanese, and Korean. A German translation was released in 2008. That year, arrangements were also made for Halder to travel to Germany with her publisher to present the book and discuss the situation of women in India. The Georg-August University in Goettingen hosted a seminar featuring Baby and her publisher on October 23, 2008. Additional seminars were organized in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Krefeld, Halle, Kiel, Berlin, and Heidelberg. Halder’s second Bengali book, Eshat Roopantar (Subtle Metamorphosis), also received a positive response.
Baby Halder lives a decent life with her three children, her two sons Subodh and Tapas and daughter Piya, their livelihood cushioned by the financial independence she gained after the domestic and international success of Aalo Aandhari.
(Edited by Harsh Pandey)
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