From the memoir: A professor writes about the triple burden of being a woman, Dalit, and disabled
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In Srinivaspuri, a family called Goel were our neighbours. Their daughter, Seema, was my age and their sons, the same age as my brothers. Mrs Goel often came by in the afternoon and she and Ma would talk for hours. I regularly dropped in to the Goel home, I’d started to do this because, apart from Seema, I was interested in the many children’s magazines like Champak, Chanda Mama, Nandan that the family subscribed to. Truth be told, those were the focus of my attention. So keen was I to read them that I would wait impatiently every month for them to arrive. And I’d manage to read them even before the children of that house did. I think, looking back, this must have been the moment the seed of the love of literature took root in me. Slowly, it began to grow, to spread its roots, to fruit and flourish. But once it began, how could I be satisfied with just these publications?
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I wanted more. But what was I to do? In our home there was not even a whiff of any desire to read. My family believed that children get “spoilt”, that they stray if they read stories. So, in the evenings...