When my son complained that he does not have enough room to store his books in his room anymore, we decided to give away the ones he had outgrown. For someone who has never thrown away a single book, this was a difficult task. Nevertheless, we plodded through the Dr. Seuss, Sandra Boynton and Eric Carle titles and piled them up. There was a whiff of nostalgia that evening. I sat reminiscing about my childhood and the countless books that I read through those precious years.
When I was about seven, I discovered a trove of Reader’s Digest issues that appa had been saving in the hope that I read them some day. We started doing the word power together and I was no match to my father of course; I would score 3-4 points and he about 10.
When we moved to Delhi, we started attending Nehru Bal Mela and international book fairs. I was introduced to the Russian fairy tales that appa bought for us, thick tomes for a pittance. Lo and Behold (a phrase often used in those books), I was hooked. By now I had started matching appa’s score of 10 on the word power. Books were an escape from the dreary ritual of academic revision. I was reading the classics by now. I think the only reason he did not chide me when he caught me once with a novel when I was supposed to be studying was that he loved books as much as I did.
Books have been my constant companion since then. Be it the essays about bibliophiles by Anne Fadiman which lies by my bedside or the ethereal script of Isabel Allende’s Aphrodite, each has filled my need for emotional comfort. And yes there did come a day when I started scoring 15 to appa’s 10! Sweetest are the wins that you achieve against those you placed on a pedestal.
I started reading to my daughter when she turned three and today she has chosen writing as her profession, and finds immense joy in her life as a result. She has finished her first work of fiction before I myself could begin writing. To my son I started reading when he was just two months old. The poem in his little hardcover book ‘happy monkeys’ would make him smile and my neighbours would urge me to recite the poem just to see his dimpled cheeks.
Email: ranjani.gopinath@gmail.com