INTRODUCTION
Mannu Bhandari died in Gurugram on 15 November 2021. She was ninety. She had been unwell for many years, but if there was one thing that weighed on her mind every day, it was her desire to write. Her daughter Rachana, with whom Bhandari spent the last five years of her life, says, 'Every day, she would fill a page with the words, "Main likhoongi (I will write)."1 She had had a series of strokes starting from 2017, her memory had begun fading and she would grope for words, but the desire to write never went away.
In a short piece on Bhandari, written after her death for a memorial volume,2 her nurse Ratna Singh writes that till her last days, she wanted to and tried to write. Till the last month before her death, Ratna urged her to finish her incomplete stories and Mannu Bhandari said she would ('If I don't, who will?'). She would pick up her pen, but after a while, put it down and say, I can't do it now, beta, I'll do it tomorrow.'
Her prolonged dry spell actually started in the 1990s, when she was diagnosed with neuralgia and began suffering from prolonged bouts of intense pain. While her medical condition was no doubt a major reason why she couldn't write, there was also a loss of creativity, a feeling that she couldn't write any longer. Mannu Bhandari has written about this in her memoir and elsewhere too. In a 1993 contribution for the Hans' series, 'Aatm-Tarpan', where writers wrote about how they would like to be remembered after their death, she began by saying that writers don't die when they stop breathing; they die when they lose confidence that they can write again. 'So I should have "died" three or four years before...' she writes.3 Though it's not entirely accurate to say that she never wrote again-some of her short stories were written in later years. 'Kartootein Mardaan', one of her best stories, was written in 2002. Her memoir-the book you hold in your hands right now-was published in 2008 and had been in the works for many years.
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