I've written before somewhere on this site that learnng to let go is a key to living  one's life in a balanced way. 

Long held, the dream of having a book published, a novel, now having been achieved, for better for worse, and the book is out and away to Amazon and Kindle to seek its fortune. The main thing I hope for is that it will perhaps bring some hours of enjoyment and expand the reader's knowledge a bit. I wrote the kind of book that I like to read, where I learn about other kinds of people and places, in other times, how different and the same these times were for the people inhabiting them.  We are all the product of these stories from the past, our own family stories, again for better for worse. 

As Dame Hilary Mantel said in her first Reith lecture, 'Once we pass away, we become fiction.'   Each person who knew us will have his or her own version of us, who we were, how we were and why, which depended on other previous fictions. And so it goes. So perhaps I am tryng to lay down a version of myself, disguised within a novel. I have certainly used threads of the stories about Pratap's grandfather, leaving for Africa, from India, on the BSS Khandalla.

These are the facts I know...the rest I have imagined, knowing he lost two young wives and didn't take another.  But I can be certain of nothing.  

So letting go...has been enormously scary, as it exposes an inner self to outer gaze. But as Maya Angelou once said, "There is no greater angst than carrying a story that wants to be told..'

This story wanted to be told, so it's off, and I hope it is read and enjoyed.