The chap was timid. He was made to become one. How else could he be different when he was directed by quite a few self obsessed adults? When you are always lorded over and are the victim of patriarchal diktats, along with insensitive women folks who pulled at your hair, lucky if nothing worse happened and one did not got lost. He almost was! Oh a forgetful childhood!
Some days even after many years, the smell of books from the British Council Library wafts into the fellow’s nostrils. Those rainy evenings and the incessant downpour came handy to create an alibi for being late back home and the British Council Library served as refuge. The James Leasor’s, and the Maurice Proctor’s exchanged their plots with him; when the books on cricket and the classic photographs in them took him across the seas , land and mountains to the cricket grounds of distant Old Blighty . He met the Bronte’s, Dickens and the rest later though. The annual subscription for juniors was a paltry five Rupees; there was animated discussion among the despots back home about the wisdom of letting him, a little boy go to the library. Consider the possibilities of the chap becoming friendly with undesirable company and going astray!
It was while in the middle school days when he first tasted Enid Blyton. Blyton was then the initiator into good English language and a wizard in snaring kids into the habit of reading and knowing. The Secret Sevens and the Famous Five where mostly endearing to boys and girls hung with Mallory Towers while little older ones with, “they walked into the sunset, hand in hand”, genre of Barbara Cartland and Mills & Boon. However Blyton books where hard to come by and often listed borrowed. That was when the irresistible urge to not just read them, but possess them became quite an infatuation in the fella.
Every day, the book store en route to school beckoned and Enid Blyton smiled at discerning kids from in there. Ruling out the idea not to plead with the despots back home to buy those books was simply a foregone wisdom. They never would, after all Rs 1.50 was a heck of a sum for book and what a waste it was to buy one! The Blyton and the Famous Five kids along with the Secret Sevens were impossibly irresistible. That was when unwittingly and unbeknownst to the fella Naxal ideology loomed about suggesting a possible solution. The early 70’s were the era of Naxalite actions! When the haves do not provide you, the have-nots must wrench it out. So he did. Filched from one of the despots the ‘million amount of Rs 1.50’, then with pride and immense satisfaction bought the first of the Famous Five oeuvre. Like the pleasant soothing of Marijuana , Blyton possessed him and what else was the recourse but keep sneaking in and lift Rs 1.50 and buy another when he had devoured the earlier one. Then another; then another; and then again another! Lo behold the 21 editions of the Famous Five and the nine Secret Sevens were safely locked up in a mystery corner in the house. The dire consequence of despots stumbling on them was a looming nightmare and possibility. Every day he surreptitiously managed to open the wooden box and feel them all over , smell their pages and get transported to the environ Blyton so vividly painted. How one wished one was born there and not in this dark, cold, insensitive and coercive place!
Like all good things ill-gotten, the books were soon found out and the question rose how and from where that collection, bundle of new books came to him. Alibis where weak because the pages smelt new and someone decided further investigations were required. Let the Great Dictator come back home, the inquisition shall begin.
Desperate times call for desperate and cruel short circuiting. He sneaked up to the terrace with those books and poured kerosene on them and watched painfully each character in them waft into the air carried by the wind and smoke. Soon there was no trace of the books but a palm full of messy, dark ash. A funeral pyre would not evoke so much tearing of the soul as those burning books did that day.
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