The thing about the HVF township in Avadi (a little suburb of Chennai) was how perfect a place it was for childhood. It had just about everything a child’s heart desires: roads to bicycle on, a park with giant old trees, badminton courts, huge playgrounds, Saturday movie shows, a club library and as for the KVHVF school library—it was truly a treasure trove of books. It had everything except a bookshop. So I read every book I had many times over, borrowed the same books from the libraries and friends again and again, and waited for my father to make the announcement once every few months: The book tent is here. Do you want to go this Sunday?
For many of us growing up from the mid-seventies to early-eighties, the Soviet Union was more than just a country that covered a large chunk of Asia in the maps. It was India’s closest ally at that point of time, and so the Soviet Union was also about the Russian circus, Dasvidanya from Raj Kapoor’s Mera Naam Joker, Sputnik magazine and the book tents.
As a small-town child, the book tents were the closest I had to a book shop. A place where I could browse and because the books were relatively so inexpensive, I could buy a book for the cost of a comic. Over the years I acquired many titles from the Soviet book tents that still are part of my library. From Ukrainian fairy tales to Gorky’s The Mother to Dostoevsky’s Brother Karamazov to a book of verse by Russian poets. I was a precocious sort, but I was only eight or nine, and so I read the verse and the Ukrainian fairy tales and ignored the rest. They seemed very difficult. What I really sought in every book tent was a book called Kids and Cubs.
My parents were a sociable lot and at least once a week they went visiting various friends. One of the friends’ homes we went to every few months was a house I enjoyed visiting unlike most others where I was afraid that I would blurt out something that would get me into trouble with my parents later. There were slightly older children in that house and there was a book I read each time I went there. My father’s friend was a trade union leader and a steadfast communist. It was quite natural then that no bourgeois afflictions like literature would have a place in that home. But probably because it came from the Soviet book tent, and was about the various pets the narrator, a young girl, growing up in Alma Ata, a little town in the Kazakh region had, Kids and Cubs was permitted entry in that home.
Much later in my thirties, I found the book in an old bookshop and that was when I realised the author was O. Petrovskaya. Later I tried to discover who this author was and the Internet came up with zilch. To this day Kids and Cubs continues to enchant me. How can it not? Sample this: “In those days all the houses were one-storied. They looked like little mushrooms peeping out from among branching trees.”
Children don’t remember authors. They remember stories. A child doesn’t read a book because it is fashionable to do so. They read only because the story speaks to them. Children start a book with neither prejudice nor expectations. That makes them a true reader in every sense.
—info@anitasattic.com