on reading...

I love reading since I was a little girl. My parents knew that if they found me curled up with a book, I wouldn’t hear anything, and would usually be munching on an apple and would usually be famished as long as I was reading!
Reading was almost like a picnic to me! I would love finding a warm but not hot place with some nice shade of the tree with possibly a hamper containing some water and some sandwiches and an apple. I would lay a mat to lie on, pull a sheet over and settle down reading while lying down. I would be always admonished on that I would ruin my eyes reading a book like that, but of no avail. I loved it that way and would have no other way. When the sun got to me, I would keep the book on my face and take a long leisurely nap! Those days seem so luxurious to me now, no bother to think how the food and the book came from, with time to smell the garden and the summer and the spring, to chase the butterflies, to hear the birds and the bees humming around, to hear the wind, to run till you panted so hard that your chest felt like a bellow, to eat wild berries and leaves till you were sick, to wake when you pleased, to wait till the sounds dimmed and you knew it was time to go back home, to drink the raindrops directly from the sky, to pluck leaves out of your hair which would be so tangled that you would need hours to finally let the comb pass through without getting stuck!
Those years of abandon when we felt all the more better for being admonished are gone.
We are now too full of fears of what others think of us. We lie, we plastic smile, we are simply scared of being us. In fact, we are so scared of ourselves that we keep our beings in some hidden attic. Chained, admonished, shamed, afraid to break away, and more afraid of being alone.
These things stay and come back flitting to me as I read. I don’t run with my hair streaming behind me full of grass and leaves anymore. But I still love reading.
I love reading the books I read as a little girl…..the Enid Blytons, the Famous Five, the Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the Secret Seven, the big books of fairytales from the world over. These books are still part of my most treasured library I have built over the years.
With these, stand the books that mark the intellectual adulthood of thoughts that never entered our heads when we were children. Life and death, compassion, soul searching, the reason of our being, the being and nothingness.
Sometimes, when I look at my books , all of which I love with a rare passion, I wonder that why on earth despite the depth and beauty of Gibran it could never match the magic of Enid Blyton. Despite reading minds of intellectuals, I feel that somewhere despite all the erudition and brilliance, they still lack a passion and fervour of childhood.
When my nephew turned 6 I bought him the entire collection of the Amar Chitra Katha comics which I grew up reading myself. Maybe he is too young to understand, but that was the only way I could connect to his childhood. As a child. My sister read him the whole stories as bedtime stories and now he is old enough to read them himself. I wish he loves reading as much as I do.
My niece is now 4 and loves reading. I someday hope to pass on my books to these children as my inheritance.