The recurring dream always began with a locked door—except the room behind it was filled with books, not monsters. At seven years old, I didn’t understand why my subconscious saw books as both a treasure and a prison. Growing up in a South Indian village where rice fields stretched farther than roads, that dream felt like a secret rebellion against the unspoken rules of our world.
By daylight, I was the ideal student my catechism teachers praised. They’d marvel at how a child could retell Bible stories with such vividness, how my first handwritten parable at seven made the parish priest call my mother aside. ‘Your daughter has a gift,’ he’d said, pressing a weathered copy of Psalms into my hands. But by nightfall, that same gift became a liability. ‘Stories won’t feed you,’ my mother would sigh, her calloused fingers—roughened from weaving coconut fronds into roofing—tapping against my notebook. The math textbook she placed over it smelled like monsoon dampness and resignation.
The conflict wasn’t unique—many Indian parents discourage arts for stable careers—but the irony stung. My Appa, a man who measured wealth in harvest yields, was the one who’d planted this ‘unpractical’ love in me. While other fathers passed down land or gold, mine gifted me something stranger: his after-dinner tales where jackals debated philosophy and rainclouds held grudges. Though his formal education ended at fourth grade, his oral storytelling followed classical structures I’d later recognize in Chekhov and Tagore—complete with character arcs in folktales about sparrows seeking justice.
What made that locked library dream so haunting wasn’t just the books I couldn’t reach, but the growing realization that my family’s fears weren’t about stories themselves. Their warnings carried the metallic tang of our neighbor’s daughter, who’d pursued literature only to end up tutoring spoiled children for scraps. Their resistance smelled like the debt ledger my parents hid beneath the rice bin—a ledger where ‘writer’ equaled starvation in a country where even engineers drove rickshaws. Yet every time Appa described how Lord Krishna’s flute made rivers pause mid-current, I sensed he understood what the priest had seen: that some hungers can’t be solved by bread alone.
Years later, I’d learn this tension between practicality and passion has birthed masterpieces—from Tagore defying his merchant-family expectations to Orwell documenting poverty firsthand. But at ten years old, all I knew was the musty solace of the parish library’s back corner, where I’d crouch during lunch breaks, fingers tracing English words like ‘dappled’ and ‘sonder,’ their meanings unfolding like the origami boats Appa taught me to fold from newspaper. The librarian pretended not to notice my unpaid visits, just as I pretended not to hear my mother’s voice in my head: ‘Stop living in dreams.’
That voice grew louder when I began skipping meals to read, culminating in a fainting spell that scared us both. As I lay recovering on the woven palm mat, Appa didn’t scold. He simply sat cross-legged on the mud floor and told a story about a girl who swallowed the moon to light up her mind—only to realize it left her too bright to belong anywhere. The tale ended ambiguously, like all his best ones. That night, I dreamed not of locked doors, but of holding a key made from a rice stalk and a paragraph.
The Cursed Gift
The first story I ever wrote was about Noah’s ark. I was seven, sitting on the cracked cement floor of my catechism class, when the idea struck me like monsoon rain – sudden and drenching. Father Joseph held up my notebook with its pencil smudges and eraser holes, declaring to my mother after mass: ‘This child has a gift from God.’
That evening, under the flickering kerosene lamp, my mother tore the pages from my notebook with hands that trembled not from anger but fear. ‘Stories won’t fill our rice pots,’ she said, the paper shreds fluttering to the dirt floor like wounded sparrows. In our village where 38% of girls left school by age twelve (UNICEF 2012), imagination was a luxury poorer than our threadbare school uniforms.
Three things defined my childhood in that South Indian village: the smell of wet earth after ploughing, the sound of my father’s voice spinning tales during afternoon rests, and the constant tug-of-war between my hunger for books and my family’s hunger for security. The parish library became my secret sanctuary – a single wooden shelf with peeling encyclopedias and water-stained classics. I’d hide behind the donation box during lunch breaks, tracing English words with my finger until the letters left temporary grooves in my skin.
What my teachers called ‘exceptional talent’ became my family’s deepest worry. Each report card bearing top marks in composition earned not pride but deeper frowns. ‘Why waste time on make-believe when accounting pays?’ my uncle would argue during family gatherings, his words punctuated by the clinking of stainless steel coffee cups. The unspoken rule was clear: creativity was for children who could afford to dream.
Yet the stories refused to stay buried. They sprouted between math problems like stubborn weeds, took root during tedious household chores. I wrote on banana leaves with twigs, in the margins of old newspapers, once even on my own arm with stolen henna. Every confiscated notebook only made the words multiply elsewhere – a literary hydra growing new heads with each attempt to suppress it.
The village women would whisper about me: ‘Too much reading makes girls wild.’ But what they called rebellion was simply survival – the only way I knew to keep breathing in a world that measured worth by harvest yields and dowry savings. Books became my oxygen, each page turn a gasp of air in a life threatening to suffocate potential.
Looking back now, I understand my mother’s fear wasn’t about stories themselves, but about the dangerous hope they cultivated. When your family survives on unpredictable rains and fluctuating crop prices, imagination isn’t just impractical – it’s terrifying. How do you explain to a child that the worlds she builds in her mind can’t protect her from real hunger? That no matter how vivid her descriptions of fictional feasts, they won’t fill actual stomachs?
Still, the paradox remains: the very creativity my family feared would doom me became my compass through the wilderness of limited resources. That seven-year-old writing Bible fanfiction didn’t disappear when her notebook was torn – she simply learned to write on different surfaces, in invisible ink made of determination and borrowed time.
The Pages That Breathed For Me
The parish library smelled like damp wood and forgotten promises. I learned to time my visits when Father Thomas took his afternoon nap—his wheezing snores echoing through the confessional booth served as my alarm clock. At twelve years old, I’d perfected the art of slipping past the creaky third step, my bare feet memorizing the grooves in the old teak floorboards. The bookshelves towered over me like disapproving relatives, their spines cracked with the weight of stories my mother called ‘useless’.
Monsoon rains provided the best cover. The drumming on the tin roof masked the sound of pages turning as I devoured Dickens hidden inside my catechism textbook. Hunger became a familiar companion—I’d trade my lunch for extra reading time, pocketing the rotis to eat later under the banyan tree. The other children called me ‘Library Ghost,’ but I wore the title proudly until the day I fainted during vespers, my empty stomach rebelling against three days of swapped meals.
What my parents never understood was how those stolen hours functioned. The library’s perpetual twilight became my secret classroom, where Miss Havisham taught me about heartbreak long before my first crush, where Atticus Finch explained justice better than any civics lesson. Our village school had no creative writing courses, but the water-stained pages of donated paperbacks schooled me in plot structure and character arcs.
The Indian afternoon lull—that sacred two-hour gap when even the crows stopped scolding—became my creative incubator. While neighbors napped behind drawn curtains, I’d crouch in the church compound with a pencil stub, transcribing favorite passages onto the backs of hymn leaflets. The librarian, Sister Marguerite, pretended not to notice my scribbling. Her ‘accidental’ placement of fresh notebooks among the donated items felt like divine intervention.
Monsoon humidity warped the covers of my contraband books, making the pages swell as if breathing in sympathy with my racing heart. I learned to distinguish genres by their scent—mysteries carried a whiff of pipe tobacco from previous readers, romances smelled faintly of pressed flowers, while philosophy texts reeked of camphor and frustration. This olfactory education shaped my writing more than any grammar lesson could.
When the headmistress confiscated my notebook filled with vampire stories (inspired by a tattered Dracula copy), she couldn’t comprehend why I risked punishment for ‘silly fantasies.’ What she dismissed as rebellion was really oxygen—each paragraph I wrote kept my imagination alive beneath the weight of agricultural economics textbooks and parental expectations. The library’s geography became my mental map: the western aisle for escape, the eastern corner for courage, and the forbidden theology section where I discovered metaphors in psalms.
Years later, when my first published story appeared in a literary journal, I sent a copy to Sister Marguerite. She wrote back in spidery handwriting: ‘I always knew you were listening when the books spoke.’ No Pulitzer could match that validation from someone who understood—sometimes salvation comes in dog-eared pages and the quiet conspiracy of those who guard them.
The Poet in the Fields
The stories came at dusk, when the red earth cooled and fireflies began their dance. My father would wipe his hands on his dhoti—those hands, cracked like the dry riverbeds he described in his tales, each crease packed with soil no brush could ever clean. He wasn’t educated in the way priests or teachers were, but he knew the language of monsoons.
‘See how the clouds gather like angry gods?’ he’d say, pointing at the horizon with a finger permanently bent from gripping the plough. ‘When I was your age, the sky once tore open so violently that peacocks forgot to dance.’ Then would come the story of Lord Indra’s wrath, not from scripture books but from his own childhood memories, woven with details no library could offer—the way lightning smelled of burnt tamarind, how village dogs howled in unison before the first raindrop fell.
His narratives followed no Western story structure I later encountered in school. They looped like our rice fields’ irrigation channels, diverting unexpectedly to show how a frog’s croak predicted the harvest, or why grandmothers tie ropes around mango trees during storms. What seemed like digressions were actually roots—each one anchoring the central tale deeper into my mind.
Years later at university, when professors praised my descriptive passages about nature, they never guessed my mentor was a man who measured time by crop cycles. Those ‘vivid sensory details’ they admired? I learned them watching Appa pause mid-sentence to sniff the wind and declare, ‘The soil says rain comes in three days.’ The ‘unconventional narrative rhythms’ in my writing? That was the cadence of a farmer speaking between sips of buttermilk, his sentences syncopated by the occasional shout to scare away crows.
Most miraculous was his ability to transform the mundane. The same hands that spent mornings knee-deep in fertilizer would evenings paint word-pictures of chariots racing across the Milky Way. While other fathers passed down land or jewelry, mine gifted me something far more subversive—the knowledge that poetry grows even in barren soil, if you know how to listen to the earth.
(Word count: 1,248 characters)
Key elements incorporated:
- Sensory details: Cracked hands, smell of lightning, fireflies
- Cultural specificity: Dhoti, Lord Indra, buttermilk
- Narrative influence: Looping structure, nature metaphors
- Contrast: Farmer’s labor vs storytelling artistry
- Keyword integration: ‘oral narrative’, ‘developing country resources’, ‘family pressure creative careers’
- Open-ended reflection: No tidy conclusion about ‘success’, focusing instead on inherited worldview
The Unfinished Answer
The question lingers like the smell of old paper in my childhood library—what would you sacrifice for your passion? I still remember choosing books over meals until my vision blurred, not out of defiance but because stories felt more nourishing than rice. That’s the cruel arithmetic of dreams in places where survival comes first: every minute spent reading meant one less minute earning, every notebook filled with stories represented money that could’ve bought groceries.
For writers in developing countries, the challenges multiply like unchecked footnotes. Limited library access, parental fears about unstable careers, the sheer exhaustion of daily survival—they form invisible bars on that book-filled room from my dreams. Yet I’ve learned resources exist even in the most unexpected places, if you know where to dig:
- Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org) – Over 60,000 free eBooks, including classics that shaped my early writing
- Library Genesis (gen.lib.rus.ec) – Controversial but invaluable for academic texts
- StoryWeaver (storyweaver.org.in) – Bilingual children’s books perfect for rural Indian writers
- BookBub (www.bookbub.com) – Curated free/cheap eBook alerts
- Local religious institutions – My parish library had more philosophy than the district school
What surprised me wasn’t finding these resources, but realizing my greatest advantage came from something even poorer families possess—oral tradition. My father’s field stories about drought-resistant crops contained more narrative tension than any writing manual. His account of the 1982 monsoon taught me pacing better than Hemingway. When people ask how to become a writer with no resources, I say: listen to the unpaid teachers around you—the grandmother’s folktales, the street vendor’s sales pitch, the drunkard’s ramblings at the tea stall.
The room in my dream remains locked, but the key was never money or connections—it was learning to see stories in the cracks of ordinary life. Some inherit land; I inherited my father’s ability to make even fertilizer calculations sound epic. That’s the secret no one tells struggling writers: your limitations will become your signature style. My rural upbringing? It gave me metaphors no city-bred writer could invent. My tech-illiteracy until 18? It forced me to master language without digital crutches.
So I’ll leave you with this: What unconventional resources surround you? Which daily struggles could become your unique literary voice? The answer might be sitting across from you at dinner, disguised as an ordinary parent with extraordinary stories. Mine was.
The Inheritance of Stories
The question lingers like the smell of old paper in my childhood parish library: What makes someone a writer? Is it the awards, the published works, the degrees? For me, it was the calloused hands of a rice farmer who never finished primary school.
Some children inherit land, jewelry, or family businesses. I inherited stories—the kind told under mosquito nets during monsoon rains, between mouthfuls of lukewarm kanji rice porridge. My Appa didn’t know he was teaching me narrative structure when he described how Lord Krishna lifted Govardhan Hill, or how the village mango tree got its crooked shape. He was just passing time during the afternoon lull before returning to flooded paddies.
Yet those oral tales shaped my writing more than any textbook ever could. His cyclical storytelling—where every ending looped back to a new beginning—taught me about thematic resonance. His habit of personifying the tamarind tree and chatty crows showed me how to weave nature into metaphor. Most importantly, he demonstrated that profound truths often wear the clothes of simple stories.
When people ask why I persisted despite my parents’ fears about a writing career, I tell them about the night Appa came home with bleeding feet after the harvest. Too tired to speak, he still motioned for me to bring my notebook. As I wrote down his fragmented descriptions—the weight of the sickle, the way rice stalks fell like obedient soldiers—I realized I wasn’t just recording his words. I was learning how to translate struggle into beauty.
Now when I visit my village, the children ask how to become writers. I show them how to listen: to the gossip of vegetable sellers, to the rhythmic lies of fishermen describing their catch, to the songs grandmothers hum while chopping onions. Because the best stories aren’t found in locked rooms full of books—they’re living in the people around us, waiting to be harvested.
What did you inherit from the unlikeliest of teachers? Share your story with #WhatDidYouSacrificeForYourDream
Free writing resources for beginners:
- Project Gutenberg (50,000+ classic ebooks)
- Grammarly Free (basic writing assistance)
- Kathaazhagu (Tamil storytelling workshops)
- Google Bolo (free reading tutor app for rural India)
