Friday, November 6, 2015

For the love of the written word

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
 - Mark Twain


I could trace the start of my journey with books to when I was eleven, but then I would be wrong...it's true that I read my first novel at that age, but my love affair had begun years before as I would listen to my father reading stories from the antics of "Tenida" and his goof ball friends written by Narayan Gangopadhyay (Oh! I loved them so!) and the crazy rhymes of "Abol tabol" composed by Sukumar Roy (literal translation is gibberish, how amazing is that!). I had tried reading comics before reading proper novels, "Tintin", "Archies" and "The Adventures of Asterix" but the pictures were too distracting, instead of reading I would start drawing and coping the pictures from them! I wouldn't have started reading if my parents hadn't insisted that I must (the teachers from my school were complaining that I wouldn't participate in class activities and my language and grammar needed improvement). Hence my father in his infinite wisdom (supposedly!) gifted me an abridged version of the classic "The Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson and I have never looked back since then...I always had a very active imagination and I needed some words to give life to the pictures in my head, and my gosh! it was so amazing to imagine Long John Silver with his wooden pegged leg, bearing a parrot on his shoulder and Jim Hawkins with his innocent face, I mean what's not to like? I had finally discovered an outlet for my thoughts and imagination, I was hooked! This was followed by "Kidnapped" by the same author, I don't remember much of the story except the scene where the boy is made to climb stairs in pitch darkness without the comfort of a candle and he almost falls since the stairs end abruptly into nothingness! And "Moby Dick", oh what a tale of adventure! Oh gosh! If I have to go on and on about all the books I have read in my life that would be pretty long and not quite engaging, what I would do instead is recount the incident and the book which were pivotal and helped me to walk on ahead in life...And this is absolutely true, these books proved to be my best friends when my life wasn't going well (okay I'll admit what I mean is when life wasn't really good is actually when things are really bad and crappy! the worst ever!!)
I shall with physical injuries and move on to emotional ones. I had been having this intense pain in my lower abdomen sometime in my early twenties which later turned out to be acute appendicitis (not a pretty picture at all) and had to undergo an operation...the operation part and the first day of fuzziness and pain was okay and somewhat bearable, but what really got to me were the the next two days...I had nothing to do, no one to talk to, alone in a sterile hospital bed and I couldn't even walk around....it was hell...I wouldn't have survived through those two days had it not been for "The Talisman", a Stephen King and Peter Straub novel...now I was and still am really into gory horror stories and had been a great fan of the Goosebumps series penned by R.L.Stine, in my early teens, although growing up I wasn't really satisfied with the simplistic plot and prose (it was quite juvenile and my sister could kill me for saying this since I think she liked them even after adolescence and the pre-and post? twenty phase!)...from R.L.Stine I had moved on to Stephen King, which satisfied my need for gore as well as complex story telling...and this particular book about a boy trying to save his mother's life and his frequent journeys to the Stephen king's version of the Neverland, "the Territories" a strange fantasy land, just sealed my loyalty to him and his franchise forever, I never tire of a Stephen King novel (except the one about a dog, "Cujo", couldn't finish that one for the life of me!).
This was a major injury but there were very many times when I had sprained my ankle (since I hate paying attention to where I am going usually, easily distracted by everything that is happening around me I often fall down and hurt myself!) and often during such times I would resort to Miss Marple and Monsieur Poirot to help me pass the tedious moments that I am trapped in bed....I had also without fail needed a new mystery by Agatha Christie every time I traveled from Kolkata (home) to Durgapur (Hostel aka HELL! where I had spent four years to earn a B.Tech degree), the train ride took around 3 hours and the journey started from Howrah in the wee hours of the morning and the book would help me stay awake through the three hours journey. I usually traveled alone those mornings and there were high chances of me sleeping through the stop to Durgapur (train was bound for Dhanbad!) which would have been quite disastrous to say the least! It was during the four years I had spent in Durgapur that I read “The Rainbow” by D.H. Lawrence, it was such a hard book to read! I had read his short stories before but never a full-fledged novel and I had to consult a dictionary for many words for I couldn't quite get the meaning of and there were so many of them! Usually when I don't exactly know what a particular word means I just read the sentence a number of times and try to grasp the meaning of the sentence and this helps me to understand what the word means but didn't help with Lawrence and his ornate style! No matter how much I crib and cry it was worth it, such a beautifully written story, some scenes from the book are seared in my memory even now, the part where Anna, heavily pregnant dances naked in her bedroom and Will her husband sees her dancing in such abandonment, feeling alienated from her, amazing! Such intense contorted feelings!
Few years down the line, after the exuberance of early twenties had settled, I was going through a rough phase, recovering from a break up and a bad relationship, and it was during those bleak years when I discovered Haruki Murakami. I had at last started reading “Kafta on the shore” after a friend and my sister recommended that I must...and it was such a surreal experience that I moved about in a dream-like state for the whole month...every time I read any of his books (my favourite till date is "Hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world", "The wind-up bird chronicle" comes a close second) I lose my perception of reality, it is essentially the best and most “trippy” feeling I have ever had and I absolutely love it! Few years back I discovered Amitav Ghosh, a voice from Bengal, he restored my faith in story telling (I was losing interest in contemporary authors, real popular ones who wrote absolute crap, this was more of an intellectual injury if I may say so!!) and his depiction of Sundarbans in “the Hungry tide” did poetic justice to the beauty of the mangrove forest...I had been to Sundarbans as a child but after reading the book, I had to go again to lose myself in the lush green forest along the forking river. And of course, J.K Rowling and the Harry Potter series, I must admit I used to make fun of my sister and my friends who were great fans, I discovered this world of magic a little late but my word! What a rich world! Absolutely loved it, I remember finishing the whole series of books in a week!! I couldn't wait to read to the end, a beautiful read indeed! 
 In recent times, due to a busy adult life comprising of work, marriage and what-nots (often laziness since it's easier to lose myself staring at the computer screen watching TV series and moves rather than reading which is at times rather taxing on the imagination at least for me since I imagine whatever I read as if I am watching the scene right before my eyes!), my habit of reading has diminished, earlier I would finish one book in a week, now it takes a month or two...but I don't really sweat it out, since books are such an important part of my life, no matter how busy or stressed I get I would need a book when I travel, sometimes before going to bed and often just like that...they are like old friends, they just keep popping up...and I do feel pangs of guilt when I ignore them too much...but they never cease to provide me with a sense of warmth and comfort.


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