Some stories are meant to be told, even if it takes forever. Like Saeeda Bano's. Bano (1913-2001) was the first Indian woman to work as radio newsreader at the All India Radio. She is the heroine we all needed, but whose legacy somehow got lost. Fortunately, she left behind her memoir, Dager Say Hat Kar that won the Delhi Urdu Academy Award in 1994, and a series of audio cassettes, which spurred her granddaughter Shahana Raza to revisit this glorious life in the just released title, Off The Beaten Track: The Story of My Unconventional Life (Penguin Random House).

A translation of the original was Bano's dream, before it became Raza's. Sometime after it was published, Bano suffered a paralytic stroke, which left her bed-bound. When Raza paid her a visit, she asked if she'd translate the memoir for her. "But Bibi you have written it in Urdu, you know I can't read Urdu," Raza remembers telling her. "This was in the summer of 1997. Shortly afterwards, just as I was leaving for America [from Delhi] to make a life for myself, eight neatly marked audio cassettes were handed to me. Bibi got her friend Nazneen (Baby Baji) to read and record the entire book for me onto analog audiotapes. The tapes travelled with me first to New York, then Tampa and finally to Dubai where I settled in the year 2000 and started a family. Unfortunately, I was so absorbed with the rhythm of my own life I couldn't translate Dagar in Bibi's lifetime," UAE-based Raza shares in the book.