There are bottled up memories and stacked up memorabilia. What is the best time to uncork it, if not on Harry’s Birthday? And that’s exactly what some Harry Potter fans in the city have done - host theme partys with their own memorabilia from the Potter universe.
It’s no castle. There is no fat lady moving across the pictures in the wall, nor is there a moaning ghost in the bathroom. But, Divya Sreedhar’s home comes as a memoir to the Harry Potter movies. There are used up tickets that rest safely inside the cupboard and worn out wallpapers that now appear starched under a low light.
Dressed in a robe and thick glasses, she makes an orchestral move with her home-made wand. It is directed to the golden snitch that rests on a table. “Wingardium Leviosa..” she chants. For a brief moment there is anxiety. Will the snitch fly? The next moment, she snaps off her possessed look and explains, “So the wand is a chopstick wrapped in paper. And this..,” she takes the snitch in her hand, “is the mounting ball on the prize that I won from college,” she giggles.
For Divya and her group of friends, the addiction to Harry Potter is an ‘honest, sincere and good liking.’ “Last year, on Harry’s birthday, we had a party themed ‘Find the seven horcruxes’,” says the host, Divya, who works at a MNC. The party had people dressed as characters from the books. So there was Harry with a visible scar and round glasses passing hateful glares at Malfoy, waiting to create a ruckus. And there was the caretaker Filch, a role taken by Divya’s sister, who roamed around carrying their pet cat.
The young fans had a Harry-centric quiz and a treasure hunt. Like the remnants after a quake, she recalls, there lay a bunch of wands, quils, Harry potter magnets, posters, score cards, along with the pieces of left out chocolate truffle cake that had the words ‘Born as the 7th month dies’ written on it, after the party.
But that’s not it. “This isTom Riddle’s diary which we hid in our bathroom,” she says with a laugh, flipping the curled up pages of a weary old diary. As we anxiously look around wondering whether Lord Voldemort’s snake Nagini will come from under the bed, the thought process snaps — There is a Twilight poster on her bedroom door. Written below Robert Pattinson’s rather vampirish face are the words – ‘Oh poor Cedric!’