Reading sense!

I was 13 years old when Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" was first published and won the Booker Prize, something that was still a relatively foreign concept to me, given I'd never yet been old enough to read anything that had won the Booker! My mother bought us a copy and me being me, I set out to read it. I read through the first few pages and got to the point where Estha has his, well, unpleasant run-in with the OrangeLemon Drink Man and remember feeling nauseous and disturbed. I gave up on the book then and never went back to it, until now that is.

For the last few years, the book followed me from bookshelf to bookshelf, wherever I went (I have a hardback with its paper cover missing. So its just a bottle green cardboard cover with the name inscribed on the spine in Gold and somehow, I prefer this to the lotus picture cover that seems to be common) but I could never bring myself to read it. My memory of the book was dark and confusing, dirty, smelly and just unpleasant. Similar to my memory of "The Ice Candy Man", another one that I read too soon in life. I had no interest in picking up TGOST again. Angstein told me several times that she had loved it and that I should read it but I stubbornly stuck to my guns.

Recently, on a holiday to Thailand, I ended up reading "Twighlight" on the beach. So hooked was I (blame it on the sun and the copious amounts of coconut water!) that I spent the last of my Thai Bahts on buying book two, three and four of the series from Bangkok airport, to carry back with me! Having pooh-pooh-ed at people who read Harry Potters for the last so many years, I was more than a little ashamed of myself for getting hooked to tripe (with all due respect) like Twighlight! (And all ye HP lovers, it is not my contention that Twighlight and HP are of the same standard! Even I believe that HP has more class!) After listlessly dragging my feet for a whole month through book two of the "bestselling Twighlight series" I finally threw in the towel and decided that enough was enough and I needed to read something about real people who didn't turn into vampires and werewolves at the slightest provocation and about girls who were not confused quivering shivering accident-prone 17 year old yeedeeyots (this is my Malayali accent from TGOST talking) who threw themselves off cliffs for the love of a vampire!
It was thus that I finally truly began to read TGOST. My first reaction to the first few pages was simply of relief at reading something that was a plausible story about plausible people. Roy is a great storyteller. In her writing, you can actually hear a seven year old's mind chattering. Words and phrases that appear in Estha and Rahel's heads such as "fallingoff noises", "greentrees", "thang God!" "the time was ten to two".. to name just a few, actually make me chuckle out loud. It reminds me of the time when I thought ilzaam was intezaam and frequently said "mujhpe galat intezaam lagaya jaa raha hai!".. and when i thought that "outside the off-stump" was actually "outside the austum!" (don't ask me where that came from!) I'm at that point in the book where Ammu, roughly the same age as me, trapped in the role of a single young mother to very intelligent twins, with one divorce behind her and a life full of whispered nudges ahead, confined to her parents' home, with a whack-job of an aunt and a has-been-genius of a brother, is finally beginning to make an appearance as an independent character and not just as the twins' mother. One can finally feel her restlessness and imagine her feeling of incredulity (sort of) at her circumstances and what her life has come to. I can sense the upcoming scandal and its not going to be pretty!

Sure, its dark and dinghy, depressing, complex, cruel, unreal even.. but its a constant prattle to lose yourself in. Fiction for the sake of fiction. Thang God!

Note to RR: I did get to "fil mactor" but haven't reached the poem yet!

Note to Angstein: don't you dare plotspoil!