The day a bird followed me home part 10
Then things started to change.
As one day, coming back from the shops, carrying a few heavy bags of groceries, their plastic cutting into me frozen fingers. It was winter, and was about to snow, and I was walking home, when someone driving past, maybe coming from the grocery store, stopped, and offered to drop me near my house, and for reason, I had accepted to get in, and took the lift with this stranger.
She had later told me, that I should never accept a lift with a stranger, though, in this case, she turned out to be a kind person, and then she also become a friend, and at her insistence, I had joined the local library, which ran classes, gave away free books, and lessons in English, in life skills. It all had started to help me pass time, and occupy my mind.
I also learned a lot, and I discovered that I enjoyed reading. Without knowing, I had actually been reading for the past one and half years, the subtitles on the tv movies, and had already improved my language a lot.
But now, I started to read properly, devouring book after book, so much so, that one of the librarians had suggested I apply for a scholarship to go to university, and I finally did, and got it!
My husband didn't mind, as long as I looked after the house, so I had ended up doing what I had never imagined I would be able to, something, that was not even my dream, going to do a masters at a university, as I had always thought, after my graduation, I will just be a wife, looking after my husband, and my family, like my mother had taught me, was my lot.
But that is not what happened, that I had thought, but what I had never imagined, and I started a masters degree, and that too, in English, and doing really well, I was asked to do a research degree, and I decided to do that too, and in all that, the phone call that had come a few months ago, from India, I had forgotten.
Then, one day, coming out of my supervisor's room, I heard my name, a familiar voice, calling me, and even before I turned, I knew, who it was, it was him.
I know these pieces are just the first drafts but think the time sequesnce here doesn't quite work - perhaps you have cut the story in the wrong place. In No 9 you moved us forward to Australia where you were a writer or publisher and then looked back to reflect on the story. Then you start this one with the end of the reflection. I feel it needs to stay connected to No 9. Of course if it were published all in one piece it might work better. Only my humble, non professional opinion!
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