Baby Haldar worked as a maid in a home in Gurgaon, in the state of Haryana, before turning her attention to a more creative passion. Her first book, Aalo Aandhari (Light and Darkness), was published last year in Hindi. Since then, two editions of the book have been printed. Recently the Bengali edition of her book was published, with the release party hosted by Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen.

Ms. Haldar's fortunes changed when she ran away from an abusive marriage and went to Gurgaon to make a new beginning. She started working as a maid to support her three children. Among those she worked for was Professor Prabodh Kumar, the grandson of one of the greatest literary figures of the Hindi language, Prem Chand. The professor noticed she spent a lot of time dusting his large collection of tomes, especially those written in Bengali.

"One day he caught me handling one of the books and asked me to read out the title," Ms. Haldar told BBC Hindi Online's Alok Prakash Putul. Baby Haldar, it turned out, had been to school intermittently until she was married off at 12 to a man 14 years her senior. "I was a bit hesitant. The book was Taslima Nasreen's Amar Meyebela [My Girlhood]. It was as if I was reading about my own life."

Professor Kumar gave her the book and asked her to read it when she had time. Other books left Prabodh's shelf in rapid succession: novels by Ashapurna Devi, Mahashweta Devi, Buddhadeb Guha. That was when Prabodh went out one day and bought her a pen and copybook. "Write," he told her, an order that made Baby almost weep with frustration. For Baby Haldar, putting pen to paper was a great trial---confronting the past that she had run away from. "It was nearly 20 years since I had ever written in a copybook. I had forgotten spellings. It was very embarrassing, especially when my children wanted to know why I was writing in a copybook instead of them."

As Sheela Reddy wrote in outlookindia.com, that "push in the 'write' direction …unlocked gritty, dark memories." Baby Haldar started writing after finishing her daily work and would continue late into the night. She wrote in the kitchen, propping her notebook between the vegetables and dishes, she wrote in between sweeping and swabbing, after the dishes and before, and late at night after putting her children to bed. She wrote about her uncaring father, an ex-serviceman and driver, of the mother who abandoned them, the night when the man she married climbed into her bed and raped her, the sister who was strangled by her husband, the terror and pain of delivering her first child at 13, searing memories she had never confided to anyone, didn't even realise she had.

"Professor Kumar would read my writing, make corrections and photocopies. And I continued to write and write. I think I wrote for months."

The professor showed her writings to his friends who were moved by the memoirs. He then translated her writing into Hindi and one of his friends, a Calcutta-based publisher, decided to risk printing it. There was a surprise in store: Aalo Aandhari began selling from the first day of its launch. "Everyone from the sweeper to the retired headmistress next door wanted to buy a copy." As noted above, it subsequently ran to two more editions.

Ms Haldar has now completed her second book.

"My new book is about the sea change that took place in my life after Aalo Aandhari was printed. Earlier society just saw me as a maid and did not even look at me and then suddenly everyone was eager to talk to me."

Ms. Haldar gets hundreds of letters every day. Some are interested in translating the book into other languages and she has also received an offer to turn the book into a film. Her life and the book have become a talking point in newspapers and on television.

Ms Haldar was taken aback by all the attention. "I am not a writer, I am just a maid. I still cannot understand why my life story is causing such a stir," she says.

But one thing, she says, has changed.

"Earlier my children were ashamed to introduce me. But now they proudly say, 'My mother is a writer'."

Compiled from BBC News online and outlookindia.com