On Reading

I was eight years old, I think, when for the first time, a novel was gifted to me. It was an abridged version of 'The Count of Monte Cristo'. When I went and showed it to my father, his eyes twinkled and he said that it was one of the best books he had read while he was at college. The praise for the book however, did not spark any enthusiasm in me to sit and read it. The first feeling I felt on receiving the book was a joy of ownership and the first thing I pictured was how it would look on my little book-shelf, standing disctint amongst my ordinary schoolbooks. Further, I felt my age being acknowledged by that someone who felt it was fitting to gift me such a wonderful and famous book. It was a feeling of intellectual upliftment, the first one that I recollect from childhood, caused because of an imagined acknowledgement rather than a genuine accomplishment. But when my father praised the book, though the pride of ownership doubled, a feeling of complacency found its way in. Suddenly the book seemed intimidatingly complex, now that I knew my father himself had been capable of reading it only on reaching college. I flipped the pages of the book to see if I could rouse some interest in me by looking at the illustrations. There were very few in number and that too they were ordinary sketches which I must say looked pretty amateurish. However, to commemorate my ownership I took out the best pen out of my dad's briefcase, an original Mont Blanc and wrote on the front page just below the title - "This book belongs to Karthik Shekhar. Standard 3, Division C, Little Angel's High School". I would do the same for every other novel that I recieved or bought for the next 5 years or so. By the time I was 13 and in my 8th grade, I had bucketed quite a collection consisting of puffin classics, encyclopedias, hardy boys, enid blytons and others, so much so that I started keeping them on the fancy glass shelves where my dad kept his books. Each book bore the stamp of my ownership without fail before it was snugly placed in the shelf. The other fact being that I never bothered to read any of the books in those 5 years.

Given a chance, I'd still like to find out what prolonged the inertia in me so much, against reading. Though none of my peers were 'readers' per say and that was probably one of the reasons I did not find reading either the 'The Famous Five' or 'The Hardy Boys' or 'The Count of Monte Cristo' gratifying in any sense. It wasn't an expedient matter for me and could be conveniently left for the future. More importantly, it did not add to my repertoire of skills that assisted me in the kind of games I used to play with my friends, most of whom made it a point to show off their aversion to reading. Some of them were so effective in making a virtue out of it, that I believed them. Ineptitude at playing cricket and reading books used to be directly and confidently correlated and I did not want to be a labeled a sissy at any cost. Though at the same time, I used to enjoy it when guests visiting our house believed I had read those books and praised me for that. As I was introduced to them, they were told without delay that I always stood in the top 3 ranks in my class and from the look on their faces it appeared to me that they considered this knowledge important, subliminally promising to spread it around. Much often they asked me which books I had read and on hearing the words 'Alexander Dumas', 'Leo Tolstoy' and 'Mark Twain', the wife used to remark to the husband, "Now you know why he stands at the top of his class always!" None of this however, created any urge in me to go and read those books which I had conveniently claimed to have read. With the physical ownership of that books, I had assumed indirect ownership of the textual property that the books contained. Yes, I say textual property and not story, for a story is something that cannot be owned and I understood that then too. Nonetheless, I could never get myself to read any of these books because the textual property that these books possessed could never translate into a story in the language of my imagination in those days.

That is not to say that I did not read anything in those days or that I was convinced by the mantra that reading books and physical machoism never went together. In disguise perhaps, but being not so good at playing cricket probably rescued me from accepting that piece of wisdom that my playmates in the colony seemed to emulate with assumed confidence. I had, in my mind, formed notions of what a 'story' ought to be like and the all the books that faced rejection and subsequent refuge in that glass shelf had in some way or the other violated my regulations. I still remember as a small kid of four years, I used to sleep on my grandparents' bed every night and insist on hearing an animal story. The one about the thirsty crow was my favourite one and I never got bored or weary of listening to it every night. Of course, a story is only so good as the storyteller himself and hats off to my grandfather who was a master raconteur! He made the crow in the story seem like an epitome of intelligence, a reverend creature who had so articulately instructed humankind on a scientific principle through an ingenious solution to a predicament. Though repeated listenings failed to tire me, my grandfather's subsequent encores used to capitulate into deep slumber as he always dozed off into his mighty snore before he could finish of the story with his favourite punchlines.

The crows flew away and these bedtime stories transcended onto different levels. My grandfather, a devout hindu, started telling me stories from the Hindu mythology. He told me those stories with a voice that was half piety and half fervour, as if he were dictating verses from a prayer book. He used to fold his hands in reverence and close his eyes in devotion whenever Goddess Durga appeared on her ferocious tiger to slay the demon Mahishasura or Krishna let his disc upon Narakasura who tried to run to the end of the world but was nonetheless hunted down and decapitated. These bedtime sessions succeeded in whetting my appetite for Indian history and mythology but more importantly they passed on a perspective that I would carry in my subconscious through my childhood. Stories were meant to be shared with the ones close to you - narrated and listened to - and the stories that I couldnt share with my family and friends then were the stories I wrote off without second thought in that glass shelf of my father's.

It was impossible for me to share 'The Count of Monte Cristo' as a bedtime story in the same way as a fable from the Panchatantra or an episode from The Ramayana with anyone who was close to me in those days. Even if I had made an attempt to read it, I think an Edmond Dantes would have seemed terribly limited in flair and panache as compared to an Arjuna. My upbringing was fairly cosmopolitan and urbane, so this fraternal comfort that I had with our native stories had nothing to do with a family induced cultural indoctrination. Our stories were relatively easier to comprehend (thanks to the Amar Chitra Katha comics) and assimilate and though this was one reason behind the aforementioned comfort, it was certainly not the only one. (to be contd..)