Healing memoir of love and loss
AVE you ever had your heart broken and ripped out of your chest while it is still beating? Lost your job, material possessions or been broke? Been abused, contemplated suicide or felt constantly kicked down by life? And have you ever felt you don’t belong, born out of time or just lonely?”
These are the thoughts that flowed through the mind of Asheen Dayal, as he sat down to write his first book,
, two years ago.
Going through different emotions at the end of a relationship, and all the challenges that followed, the author’s weapon of recovery was to express his feelings of anger, grief and pain by writing letters to the woman he loved.
Although he never sent her the letters, Dayal addressed them to her, telling her of his trials and tribulations in the year when he lost everything.
He said the content was unadulterated, unedited and real.
“I went from being an unsavoury self-made high-flying multimillionaire executive to self-inflicted benevolent poverty,” said Dayal, formerly from Durban.
“Everyone tries to hide the bad and only tell the good. However, life is not about the fake happy posts on Facebook walls and Instagram feeds. I tell of it all and purge my soul in my book.”
, he added, is a #Ellyphantshoe memoir of love and loss. It tells the story of him grappling with daily life, then delves into those life events and his past.
This included discovering his heritage and that his great-grandfather, Shri Bhawani Sannyasi Dayal, was an author who
#Ellyphantshoe
wrote
#Ellyphantshoe, Biography of Mahatma . Gandhi
Dayal, who now lives in Johannesburg, said he had not envisaged that the single handwritten letter he penned to the love of his life, a former girlfriend who left him for another man, would lead to him becoming an author.
“I know she would not care if I was dead or alive and chose to be deliberately oblivious to my plight… but I want the readers to live and walk the life of another’s path…
“If all I ever achieve is one other person identifying with my story, and if I, in some small way, can help them through this drudgery we call life, then I am content.”
He added that he wanted to give his readers insight, from a man’s perspective, on break-ups and on the fact that men also get their hearts broken.
“Every story I have ever read sought to portray good women who are always scarred by dastardly men, but the opposite is true more often than the world is willing to admit.”
He plans to write at least one more book as either a prequel or sequel.
“Writing the book and the discovery of my long-lost heritage has placed me on a different path in life.”
In keeping with the modern theme, Dayal published the book on the online Amazon Kindle Bookstore earlier this month, with a paperback version planned for late 2018.