B for Books

What was your childhood like? Cricket on the street? Kho-kho within the compound? Eating mud? Yeah, someone told me that eating mud is a thing every kid does, apparently. The only outdoor game I remember ever playing goes something like "Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta". Beats me if I can recollect what exactly it was, but it definitely was a game played before these wonderful cities underwent name changes.

Most of my time other than this game were spent indoors, filling out the couch reading, rather, devouring books. I would clock at least one book a day during summer holidays, the TV ignored in a corner, my friends chilling out at their grandparents' places in the country. 

Looking back, I think my parents had it easy. All they had to do was take me to Landmark, the friendly, neighborhood bookshop (actually quite a large one), where I would buy at least 10 books at a time. No, sir, no. Libraries were not for me. I wanted to own my books, sorting and arranging them by author and genre, on the bookshelf in the drawing room. They didn't have to bother about me getting a sun stroke playing out in the heat of the vicious Chennai summers, or getting lost on the streets, or being hit by a motor vehicle on the road. Rather, I would assume they were bothered about my absolutely immobile existence.

This blog in fact takes after my favorite children's writer, Enid Blyton. I would spend the days imagining myself in a boarding school, moving up forms rather than classes or standards, having midnight feasts consisting of scones and plum cakes in the garden tool shed, away from the prying eyes of matrons and house heads, and living in the English countryside.

While years have gone by, and the books I read have become heavier, both in size and content, the love still remains, rather has grown. And, while my reading list has expanded to include Rushdie and Orwell and Vikram Seth and Khaleed Hosseini, comfort food still remains my good old English favorite countryside through the eyes of Wodehouse. Jeeves is the best, isn't he?

P. S. This post is the second in the A-Z blogging challenge series for April.