Aged 12, I was on to Rommel, cowboy tales and then some

This column started out with me thinking about the one novel that took my breath away — Ragtime — and about the particular skill of the author to intertwine slices of history with fiction. The author, EL Doctorow, was described by some, as someone who put the ‘story’ into history. I have no idea how I chanced upon his book but I found it difficult to put down. Ragtime is a form of music that predates jazz and its liberal introduction of new themes serves to surprise, and so it is with the book. You go careening through themes and meet characters like Harry Houdini, Henry Ford and JP Morgan. Light plays a role in the book, as does Scott Joplin who was a master of ragtime.

Ragtime led me to another work of Doctorow, called Homer and Langley, that was based on the life of the wealthy and reclusive Collyer brothers. The book draws you in and I found the fantastic devolution into chaos and tragedy as powerful as Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. I confess I used to feel claustrophobic when I thought of that massive mansion filled to the ceiling with stacks of newspapers, with narrow passages left like ant-trails for people to walk through.

But if I think back to my childhood, I wasn’t very discriminating. Books equalled joy. Whatever we could lay our hands on in the library was devoured. We never left without the maximum number of books permissible.

My mother would find me reading with a flashlight under the covers. That did not end well. It was such torture to sit at the dining table — everybody seemed to chew so slowly — all I wanted to do was get back to my book. But ahem, manners! One visitor at home was amused when mum was complaining about the fact. “So, which was the last book you read?” he asked me. “Rommel,” I said. He was perplexed about why a 12-year-old was reading about the battle strategies of a German general. I should be reading Nancy Drew and Famous Five. Perhaps Agatha Christie and Alister MacLean.

But I did! And also Biggles, by Capt WE Johns, who I think, was my first big crush. The popular books were snagged fast in the libraries, and we tried to charm the librarians. Didn’t work. Librarians, like accountants, the world over, do not have a sense of humour. So we turned our attention to Russian literature, which was also plentifully available and beautifully illustrated. Baba Yaga, the wicked witch whose house in the middle of the forest rotated on chicken feet — she gave me the heebie jeebies. Two years ago on a holiday to Russia, I found a roadside stall selling a doll of the witch. What do you think? I left it there. Copies of National Geographic were precious too, and were read from end to end. The photography, the places, wildlife, nature, was utterly brilliant.

At every stage of reading a particular author is powerful. If comics were fun, then they were great for the time. If reading about the adventures of Huckleberry Finn had us accompany him, barefoot and brilliant, then we were up for adventure. Tom

Brown’s School Days and The Count of Monte Christo led the way to Dickens and the classics.

And at home, I raided my father’s collection of Somerset Maugham. He also read Galbraith but I don’t remember reading any. I have to confess at this

At every stage of reading a particular author is powerful... Westerns were a very important slice of my reading starting from my pre-teens. You wouldn’t believe how easily these books were available in small towns in India

point that the one writer I detested, was VS Naipaul. I just found his books depressing, and if they depicted reality, I wanted none of that.

The first ‘big’ book I read in terms of pages (well, it was a red letter moment since I was 13 years old) was

Roots, by Alex Haley. I was so engrossed, I finished the book in two-and-a-half days. The scope, the drama, the life in those pages completely captivated me. That, for me, was epic. Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 followed days later, and then The World According to

Garp, by John Irving. But I forget a very important slice of my reading starting from my pre-teens. Westerns, or cowboy westerns, to be precise. Zane Grey of Riders of the

Purple Sage fame and Louis L’Amour personified great writing for me at the time. And a sprinkling of Max Brand. You wouldn’t believe how easily these books were available in small towns in India. The descriptions of the wild west, homesteaders and cowboys and Indians, gunslingers, marshals and outlaws, of eking out a living while balancing man and nature, and the relationship between man and beast — what an enormous canvas. It is with me, still.

I have to mention a visit around the time to a museum in a small town in Madhya Pradesh which

had one of the finest collections of weapons and small arms, that resulted in my brother and I excitedly identifying vintage weapons. Flintlock mechanisms, Colt Dragoons and Smith & Wessons got our complete attention as a befuddled caretaker tried to figure out how on earth these young kids knew all that. Elementary, my dear Watson — or Sharmaji in all probability — we had read about them.

My grandfather got me reading Jim Corbett — The Man-eating Tiger of Rudraprayag — and Rudyard Kipling, and James Herriot. The magic of JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s

The Great Gatsby. The stunning One Hundred Years of

Solitude, and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez — nobody walks away untouched.

One stunner of a book is Watership Down by Richard Adams, started as an account to scare his kids by the author. Hazel, Fiver and Woundwort live on in my imagination — and they are rabbits! A great book to give pre-teens, although I only got my hands on a copy much later. Made up for it by giving it to my son when he was 11. Early dabbling in science fiction (I looked for slimmer volumes in a dusty library in Jabalpur) cleared the way for the cult series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.

All of these are only a selection of the books I read in my formative years. Names, authors come to mind and I remember how magical a summer was when I curled up with a bunch of good books. Truly a gift — all these writers like a million light-pins in the sky, that I can reach for and read again and again. The intimacy of the written word, because when you are the reader, that word is yours alone.