Books - 1
The earliest books I encountered were a few illustrated volumes of nursery rhymes and fairly tales in English and Bangla (these are all the exact editions, I recognize the pictures - the internet is great!).
The Bangla books came as gifts from our relatives in Kolkata. For the book about ghosts and kings, my mother asked me to write a thank you postcard. "Write, your book made me scared and happy. Then draw two pictures - one of a scared face and one of a happy face." I obediently came back with the drawings half an hour later. "Wonderful", she said, "this face looks so frightened and the other one looks so excited." "But ma, that one was supposed to be the happy face", I said, pointing at the one she thought was scared. But she totally ignored me and has ever since told the story as evidence of my incredible drawing skill at a tender age.
Reading became a joy, an escape and a deeply felt comfort only when I went to boarding school in third grade. It was there, in the junior dormitory, that I discovered my first book about real people, "Little house on the prairie". It was a revelation that there could be long stories about people just like me with nonmagical, ordinary lives! Here too, I found my first library. Every week, during library period, we would be taken to the junior library, a long room with low shelves around the walls, stocked with hundreds of colorful books. It would take the entire hour to leaf through one book, then another to finally choose one or two to take back with me to the dorm. What is it about booklined spaces that feels, to a misfit in the world, like a warm embrace; like someone saying "you're okay here, you're home"? It is to libraries that I instinctively run, even now, for consolation.
Our lives in boarding school were regimented by the bell, the days crammed with meals, study hours, classes, prayers (it was a Christian school), with an all too short outside play time in the evening. But there were two spans of time when I got to read to my heart's content - one permitted, one surreptitious. The permitted reading time was Saturday afternoon, the whole time from lunch until evening tea you could stay in bed and read. Most of the material consisted of much-thumbed issues of children's magazines along with a few story books. No reading allowed on Sunday afternoons, we were supposed to sleep (don't ask me why). Some of us occasionally tried to sneak a book under the covers on Sundays but most of my clandestine reading took place at night, aided by the fortunate circumstance that my bed was right next to the bathroom where the light stayed on all night. The matron caught me a couple of times and wrote a long, complaining letter to my mother. But although I was generally a very compliant child, the matron's censure had no effect on me. Reading, anywhere and anyhow, just felt right.
It was in boarding school that I got my favourite childhood book "Polly of Primrose Hill", the story of a girl in an orphan's home, as a prize at the end of standard four. They didn't give prizes to just a few topppers, many kids got books for "good work" or "very good work" (although, I suspect, not everybody did; what about kids who tried but couldn't do good work or didn't try for one reason or another? These questions didn't occur to me then, class ranks were openly announced and hierarchy was a way of life). That year, friends got "Jane Eyre", "School library mystery" and and other books from the colourfully bound Abbey Classics series with board covers, thick pages and a gold lettered cloth spine. Altogether, we had great fun sharing and reading the new books. "Polly" was a book that my mother fell in love with too. We would discuss the very candid things that Polly sometimes said, like asking why people always love you when you go away or die; or how she said to her favourite teacher Miss Campion (who made her long for things she hadn't been aware of before) "I used to be happy until you came." Just like Mrs. Gallows promised Polly, my mother promised to buy me a yellow party dress. That was one promise she kept years later, unlike another one...my mother who loved reading when she was younger, always felt sorry when she had to make me stop reading and do school work or other chores. She said she would buy me a revolving bookcase that I could keep right next to my bed. To find a new book to read, I wouldn't even have to get out of bed, I could just push it round to look at the books on the other side. I'm still waiting for that one.
 |  |  |
Reading became a joy, an escape and a deeply felt comfort only when I went to boarding school in third grade. It was there, in the junior dormitory, that I discovered my first book about real people, "Little house on the prairie". It was a revelation that there could be long stories about people just like me with nonmagical, ordinary lives! Here too, I found my first library. Every week, during library period, we would be taken to the junior library, a long room with low shelves around the walls, stocked with hundreds of colorful books. It would take the entire hour to leaf through one book, then another to finally choose one or two to take back with me to the dorm. What is it about booklined spaces that feels, to a misfit in the world, like a warm embrace; like someone saying "you're okay here, you're home"? It is to libraries that I instinctively run, even now, for consolation.
Our lives in boarding school were regimented by the bell, the days crammed with meals, study hours, classes, prayers (it was a Christian school), with an all too short outside play time in the evening. But there were two spans of time when I got to read to my heart's content - one permitted, one surreptitious. The permitted reading time was Saturday afternoon, the whole time from lunch until evening tea you could stay in bed and read. Most of the material consisted of much-thumbed issues of children's magazines along with a few story books. No reading allowed on Sunday afternoons, we were supposed to sleep (don't ask me why). Some of us occasionally tried to sneak a book under the covers on Sundays but most of my clandestine reading took place at night, aided by the fortunate circumstance that my bed was right next to the bathroom where the light stayed on all night. The matron caught me a couple of times and wrote a long, complaining letter to my mother. But although I was generally a very compliant child, the matron's censure had no effect on me. Reading, anywhere and anyhow, just felt right.
It was in boarding school that I got my favourite childhood book "Polly of Primrose Hill", the story of a girl in an orphan's home, as a prize at the end of standard four. They didn't give prizes to just a few topppers, many kids got books for "good work" or "very good work" (although, I suspect, not everybody did; what about kids who tried but couldn't do good work or didn't try for one reason or another? These questions didn't occur to me then, class ranks were openly announced and hierarchy was a way of life). That year, friends got "Jane Eyre", "School library mystery" and and other books from the colourfully bound Abbey Classics series with board covers, thick pages and a gold lettered cloth spine. Altogether, we had great fun sharing and reading the new books. "Polly" was a book that my mother fell in love with too. We would discuss the very candid things that Polly sometimes said, like asking why people always love you when you go away or die; or how she said to her favourite teacher Miss Campion (who made her long for things she hadn't been aware of before) "I used to be happy until you came." Just like Mrs. Gallows promised Polly, my mother promised to buy me a yellow party dress. That was one promise she kept years later, unlike another one...my mother who loved reading when she was younger, always felt sorry when she had to make me stop reading and do school work or other chores. She said she would buy me a revolving bookcase that I could keep right next to my bed. To find a new book to read, I wouldn't even have to get out of bed, I could just push it round to look at the books on the other side. I'm still waiting for that one.
Comments
Post a Comment