About Maya

Once upon a time there was a six year old who discovered a book. A well- worn, slightly dog- eared book with a bright shiny cover. She opened the book and within the pages found fairies and elves, hedgehogs and badgers, and all manner of magical things. And she fell in love with stories. A year later she met Jo March and declared, "I want to be a writer when I grow up.”

Many twists and turns later, in her late teens, she was still chasing her dream. Jo March still lived in her dreams– she cut her hair but no one paid her for it. Then she wrote her first grown-up story and a magazine paid her.

Many stories happened and some poems too. Now she wanted to write her novel. She had discovered the Romance by now and like all people of her generation, was caught by the trauma of partition. Her first attempt at long fiction married the two and it was a deliciously cliched story that had a refugee camp, an inter- faith love , a moustachioed villain and a nautchwlali. Good sense kicked in and it was consigned to the waste bin.

But the story bug was still in her and she still dreamt of ivory towers and ink stained hands when her mother asked her, “all this is very well but what are you going to do for a living?” Nobody can puncture a fantasy like the Middle Class Indian Mom.

So life happened- work, motherhood and more and the writing for a while was a trickle. Until one day, the ticking clock began to sound urgent and ominous and this young-girl-who-was-now-a-not-so-young-woman declared, “it’s now or never” , and throwing caution to the winds , picked up her pen again. Like birds flying home, the words came back, the poems slid into pages, the stories wove themselves and the books happened. This web page holds these stories and this life lived in words.


Thank you for stopping by.