‘I’ll never be a writer’ :Maari Sayed

Having said that, now, AR Antulay’s granddaughter Maaria Sayed’s debut book of poems is being released this Sunday...

At first glance she’s your regular bubbly teenager — full of giggles and spark, a film buff in love with Shah Rukh Khan and not quite ready to trade in her bunch of pals for a boyfriend. But there’s also a gifted writer inside Maaria Sayed.

Her granddad is the only member of her family she knows who wrote books — two of them to be precise — but Maaria hasn’t taken a leaf from either of them for her own debut with the pen. And by the way, he’s no ordinary granddad — AR Antulay, the present Union Minister for Minority Affairs is a veteran Congressman and a former Chief Minister of Maharashtra.

“But I don’t know even the ‘p’ of politics,” laughs Maaria. All of seventeen now, her precocious talent for weaving emotions and everyday observations into poetry wasn’t something she herself took very seriously till circumstances conspired to bring it into the limelight.

“I had been penning down so many of my thoughts over a period of 6-7 months — it seemed to be my sole way of expressing myself. They are all heartfelt, and even when my friends and family thought they were really good, I was still hesitant about getting the poems printed. But I’m not embarrassed by anything I’ve put onto paper,” says Maria, whose ‘My Thoughts At Sixteen’ will be released this Sunday by Shobhaa De.

Half a dozen of her oil-on-canvasses fill her flat overlooking Worli seaface, but she needs to be reminded that it’s probably another talent waiting to be discovered. “You see, unless the mood and the emotion grips me, I can neither write nor paint. Some of my paintings have taken a year for me to complete. So, in that sense, I don’t think I’ll ever be a writer or a painter.”

While her father Amjad Sayed is a judge in Bombay High Court judge, Maaria’s says her surest sounding board has always been her mother. “She’s a tremendously creative woman and my sharpest critic.” What Maria is really looking forward to now is meeting Shobhaa, whom she hugely admires. “I’m a nobody and she’s someone I really look up to. I’m so impressed by her confidence,” she signs off with a winning smile.

s_saumit@dnaindia.net