Growing up, What Did You Dream of Becoming One Day?

Growing up, my one goal was to get tall enough to leave the small town I was born in. For years I believed that height was the one requisite quality that allowed adults to go wherever they wanted and be whoever they wished to be.

I realized early enough in my journey that I was mistaken. A tall teenager is no less awkward and has no more authority than a short one. As I said in this post, I grew up in a household that was extremely controlling and, possibly with all good intentions, very claustrophobic.

By the time I turned eighteen, my dream of leaving my hometown came true. By this time I knew what I didn’t want to be: namely, an engineer or a doctor, the only two professions considered respectable enough in my town and by my parents.

I had a vague ambition of turning my love of drawing into my vocation. Fashion design was an impractical, exotic choice of career in an India that had freshly opted for liberalization. Globalization wasn’t a thing yet and I had no clue about the level of exploitation, stress, and sheer indifference to the environment that fashion would devolve into. My dream of becoming a fashion designer came to a crashing halt once reality struck after a few years in the business.

Once I got married and moved to Malaysia, it became increasingly clear that the fashion world I’d left behind held no interest for me. Worried for my sanity (I wasn’t used to being jobless), my husband encouraged me to write articles and work as a freelancer. By now globalization had begun to make itself felt. An article I wrote on my balcony in Malaysia could sell in California, and earn me U.S. dollars, which went a long way in Asia.

Over the course of years, that freelancing gig evolved into an abiding interest in creative writing, short fiction, and eventually, novels.

By the time I began writing my debut, You Beneath Your Skin, in 2011-12, becoming an author began to look like a realistic possibility. As a child and a teen I’d gorged on all of my father’s collection of books, reading Shakespeare, Shaw, Zola, Flaubert, Chekhov, Maupassant, Maugham, Hemingway and so on. All dead authors (or at least I thought they were dead). I did read some Alistair Macleans and Sidney Sheldons and Harlequin novels from a local library, but an author was not a real person to me. In fact, I’d never met a live one before I attended a reading in Malaysia. Becoming an author was not part of my reality or my imagination as a child or a teen.

Today though, here I am, three books out there in the world, with more in the pipeline.

This week, Amazon chose my US debut, The Blue Bar, as its India pick for World Book Day. As a result, it shot up in Amazon rankings, and is hanging out as a #1 Amazon bestseller in all three categories, and #23 overall on Amazon USA last I checked. It’s a lovely windfall of a boost for the book, which is selling like gangbusters in other formats, despite  (or because of) the free ebook version.

So here I am. In a career I’d never dreamed of.

What about you? Have you turned out to be who you wanted to become? Is it important to have a dream growing up? What if you become someone other than who you’d dreamed of?

Thank you all so much for your support of my work, and my fledgling career, such as it is. If you have an Amazon account, a follow will really help my ranking stay afloat. If you have a Kindle, a free download would do wonders.

If you’re on twitter, you could support this post. On Instagram, comments and shares of this post in your stories will help.

I appreciate all of you more than you know. And I’m keen to hear all about your childhood dreams of your adult self.