BANGALORE: Communism never stopped me from enjoying cowboy novels.
I was an ardent fan of Louis L’amour. One morning, after coming back from work, I picked up one of those paperbacks that I had stacked up over the years.
I went into the retro mode.
It all began when I was in school. After the plague in Gujarat (back in the mid-nineties), we had to return to Kerala with a few of our belongings of which the television box was left behind.
Now this was a cross road in my life. I was bored to death and unlike my sister, I did not have the habit of reading books.
After roaming around for hours, climbing trees and fishing in the river there was still a lot of time left. I finally decided to read my first novel (quite late I know- I was in the sixth standard then).
It was the smallest of those western frontier paperback novels, and the author was Louis L’amour.
The plot of a good old cowboy story is quite simple. A weatherworn; saddle-happy, romanticist is the hero. There usually is a lady in the story, a villain and a few sidekicks. The hero is always good at fist fights, thinking, and shooting, and the villain is equally good. Often, the story revolves around a mining claim, a ranch, a hidden treasure or occasionally a woman.
There usually is a trip through the desert and sometimes Injun fighting. The story ends in a shootout between the villain, hero and a few others. I love those types of books, nothing much to think, an easy read- just plain vanilla story-telling with a lot of realism in it (That is if you don’t think too much).
As my inclination to communism grew steeper, I started to try and put some perspective into those harmless cowboy novels.
I told a few friends that the book is a nice read although I’ve had to politically disagree at many occasions with the authors’ description of how the West was supposedly won. I also disagreed with how he glorified the annihilation of a whole tribe (the native Americans) and how he glorifies the native American tradition on the one hand and sometimes tries to explain the genocide as a part of the continuous growth/ evolution on the other.
I find traces of those cowboy novels in my life today. Each time I pick up the newspaper or switch on the TV, it is almost like picking up one such novel-- you read/see it because it involves minimum thought. But the problem is, my thoughts don’t stay silent for long. Every once in a while, I feel the need to join hands with the Cubans and the Latin Americans. I somehow had to get in touch with them and start doing something about all the killings in Afghanistan, Iran, Africa and South America. I don’t think I can ever have my childhood back — where the term, collateral damage, meant nothing.
bngexpresso@epmltd.com