RELATIONSHIPS

Monarch! Means Idiot! Colored Means Feisty

Mix-ups of a tween who read by stealth

That’s me in the USA with a President Reagan cut-out.

My parents hated to see me read

Amma-Appa bought more books than other parents did, but it was never enough. If anybody bought me a book by an author I had never heard of, my parents actually quailed.

Asterix and Obelix

I first heard of Goscinny and Uderzo when an uncle gifted me an Asterix. I looked at thumbnails of comics on my book’s back cover, and begged. Asterix was a French book that had Latin puns translated into English. I chuckled aloud when I read. The bungalow peons thought I was crazy.

That’s my mom, in the red saree and in the blue saree. In the B&W pic she is the little girl who’s looking away from the camera. My dad is behind her in the red saree pic with my daughter.

They cut off his foot

I ruined a road trip to Cherapunji by reading Roots all the way. I started to wail as I read, wringing my hands. My parents explained that all the blacks in America were now free. They used Lewis Latimer and the lightbulb to explain that the darker you were in America, the more likely you were to be a scientist.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was kept safely out of sight and mind. Roots was beautiful. Your manhood or your foot still makes me weep. Alex Haley says he is happy with his ancestor’s choice, else he would not have been born.

Kunta Kinte’s losing a foot and all Haley cares about is being born.

Crockery and the Holocaust

Anne Frank and her diary led me to Jeffrey Archer’s Kane and Abel. I interrogated my dad on the Holocaust. He started to weep, and I was alarmed. My mother was white with fury, saying he should have lied.

She said, they carpet-bombed Dresden for that, Roopa. Give it up.

I didn’t. I’d read about Dresden porcelain in a book about an orphan owner of a Dresden doll. I wept for 60 lakh Jews plus 10,000 Dresden citizens.

That’s my dad. You can see the edge of a Hitkari cup there — not Dresden!

I flipped crockery over to see where it was made, and thought of the Holocaust.

That’s me. I turned out OK, became a dentist. My mom needn’t have worried.

Ghetto getaways

Auschwitz was in a novel with a ghetto.

Escape from the ghetto on a trolley led to death, and staying there meant Auschwitz.

The ghetto was a residential prison. Inmates slaved for the enemy in the city by day, and were locked into the ghetto at night.

Escape From Sobibor was serialized on our free, national TV. Our school Principal ordered us to watch it with our parents. That wasn’t in a book.

Solder saved me

I was in sunny India, skipping along in an airy bungalow, but these stories upset me. My scientific-minded brother would read my face and involve me in an electrical project.

Solder goes chusss. If you use too much, the wires will fall apart and lead to a scolding. Roopa Koopa! Don’t do that! Just like the tipping of the soup bowl to see where it was made*.

That’s my brother in 2019, on an India trip

Intermittent Rewards Causing Addiction

My parents hid books and authors from me. Who would tell a drunkard the names of new kinds of spirits?

When I reached the end of a 600-item Enid Blyton book list, Amma-Appa rewarded me with a visit to the bookstore in Calcutta. If there was a bookstore in tiny Chittaranjan, they never told me about it.

There entered Dame Agatha Christie. I liked the atmosphere of rural England, the places and the friendly working couple marriages as Poirot, Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford solved mysteries.

Mix-ups

Stephen King thought ‘bitch’ meant a very tall woman, because a son of a bitch was likely to be a very tall basketball player. I had similar mix-ups.

In Dr. Christiaan Barnard’s book, One Life, he uses Colored, in uppercase. I thought ‘Colored’ meant, of a tribe called the Coloreds, from the Colohari or Kalahari desert.

In lowercase, I thought colored meant feisty. Jolly. Happy-go-lucky. Colored, opposite of bland, or boring, or drab. Why ever would it mean dark?

Thus, I didn’t realize the racial undertones the book had. However, at the climax, Dr. Barnard’s language is clear as crystal. He frets, praying that the donor and recipient should both be white.

In Vikram and Vetal, the Vetal, a zombie storyteller scolds King Vikramaditya for his stupidity in accepting an impossible challenge. Vetal starts the sentence with ‘Monarch!’ I thought it meant ‘Idiot!’

Dictionaries were for doubts

I never used a dictionary because I was reading on the sly. Demanding use of the dictionary would have given the game away. I wasn’t working on my Math or Hindi, but was reading another English book.

Besides, I wasn’t in doubt.

Why would I look up colored anyway? It isn’t even a difficult word.

Our Oxford Concise Dictionary has the thinnest pages you’ll ever see in a book, which snap when tugged at.

In ‘90, we got an Oxford Advanced Learners’. It had biographies and images, it was part encyclopedia.

That was my childhood, the tales you can’t unread.

In case you’re curious

Bungalow peon was a manservant assigned by the Railways to officers of a certain rank. My dad was 34 when I was born, so I don’t remember a bungalow without a peon.

That horrible book of Miss Stowe’s: In The Foxes of Harrow by Frank Yerby, Tom asks to see the whipping post in Julie’s plantation home. Julie says, ‘we don’t whip our slaves. You’ve been reading that horrible book of Miss Stowe’s.’

Lewis Latimer’s Lightbulb

*Lewis Howard Latimer was draftsman of Bell’s telephone. He invented the light bulb’s carbon filament. The alliteration Lewis Latimer lightbulb stuck in my head.

Re-telling changes numbers

*24700–25000 people were killed by Allied carpet bombing in Dresden, not 10,000.

Oxford Book Store isn’t a dictionary shop

Oxford Bookstore, Park Street, Calcutta, I thought was a shop that sold only dictionaries. My expression changed when I got there.

Anne Frank

*Anne Frank was in my school reader. It is in my daughters’, too.

Food before curiosity

At Golden Dragon restaurant, New Delhi, the soup was hot. Drink the soup before checking if the bowl is Dresden or not. Chittaranjan didn’t have restaurants with three-course meals.

Books and Bacon

You’re too young for it, meant — the story is too harsh. They wouldn’t confiscate the book, though.

Perry Mason was confiscated.

That’s me at work, demonstrating to colleagues, before Corona.

My mother was a literature graduate who quoted Shakespeare and Francis Bacon.

The Bacon quotation she used was Too Much Reading Is Sloth. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar.