When I was 10, and had nothing to do one summer holiday, my father reached into his modest library and gave me his copy of To Kill a Mockingbird . I read it and found it to be a children’s book, the story of three friends, six-year old Scout, her brother Jem and their friend Dill. The following summer, I read it again. And discovered layers I hadn’t noticed before.

Sitting in Cochin in the 1980s, so far away from Maycomb Alabama in the 1930s where the book is set, I began to understand through this one story of an upright lawyer Atticus Finch, trying to defend a black man falsely accused of rape, that the world is not monochromatic. That people, grown-ups, cannot be trusted to always do the right thing; that they themselves often don’t know what the right thing is. Through every re-read of To Kill a Mockingbird , I have learnt new life lessons. And through them I have, in some ways, managed to understand my own self.

This tight braid of a shocking revelation of the state of the world and the state of the self that To Kill a Mockingbird knots is not unique to me. Over the last 55 years, since the book was first published in 1960, millions of young people have derived several lessons from it. These have been lessons on fairness and on courage. On holding on to human ethics, no matter how trying the circumstances.

That harder as it may be, doing the right thing even when everyone around is not, is the only way to live. “Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what,” Lee wrote.

Lee’s death on Friday, at the age of 89, has left behind generations of bereft readers. For over thirty years, she lived the life of a recluse. Frequently there were rumours that Lee was writing another book, but nothing came of them. Lee did not give any interviews or accept any awards. In 2015, to the shock of the literary world, the publication of another book by Harper Lee was announced. Go Set a Watchman , was essentially part of an earlier draft of To Kill a Mockingbird .

The initial print run was 2 million copies and they sold out in no time. However, a majority of readers was shocked and saddened by it. Atticus Finch, who for five decades was revered as the idealistic outlier in the world of colour politics, was portrayed in Watchmen as a staunch supporter of segregation. Whether Lee was coherent enough to approve the publication of this book is still a fruitless speculation.

Despite the disappointment of Go Set a Watchman , Lee remains a hero. Through six-year-old Scout’s eyes, Lee showed us a worldview that would have taken a lifetime to understand, if at all. Sad as the news of her death is, the heartening reality remains that decade after decade, from Somalia to Singapore and Anchorage to Adelaide, millions of people, some children, some adults, will discover, through the book in their hands, the irrefutable reality that even though the world is a messed up place, you can still be an honourable person.

To kill a mockingbird is a sin, Atticus Finch tells his young kids in the book. And no matter how dire things are, this particular mockingbird will never die. Lee lives on.