THE WOES OF A RESTLESS READER

THE WOES OF A RESTLESS READER

MUSINGS

I SMILED; ACTUALLY NO I BEAMED AS REALISATION DAWNED ON ME, WRITES TAIBA MUSADIQ SAHAF

 Of late I have been condemned to the deepest dungeons of objectivism, nihilism and all such philosophies propounded by Ayn Rand, Fyodor M Dostoevsky and Paulo Coelho. I am in the Pandora’s Box where I am flanked on all sides by the evils of literary works. Though I harbour no rancour against them at all, as a matter of fact, I revere the geniuses of literature but the agony of the fact that my mother imposes an entire collection of classics (fantasy novel have indubitably been on her hit list for some time now) on me is beyond tolerance. There is a curfew on the number of books I can buy in a bookshop, not exceeding two, and what with my mother already having made up her mind as to what classics she will inveigle me into buying there is no end to the troubles I have to face customarily in a bookshop. And if I screw up my features in repugnance, she besides admonishing me initially ends up eventually ingratiating me into buying all sorts of classics. In one such odyssey  I went gallivanting into my favourite haunt Password only to leave it disgruntled, with my head cocked at an angle of 30˚ and walking with a hunchback for which I am constantly reprimanded by my mother (mothers derive morbid pleasure from expressing disdain at almost every action of ours) peeped for the last time at the rack of fantasy novels, then walked to my car, opened the door, gave a pregnant pause (only to make it dramatic of course!) left it open for a while and finally ensconced myself in my recluse (the seat beside the driver, in this case my mom) .

I wonder at times as to why I didn’t participate in games of charades at school, I would unequivocally have bagged a clean sweep. I am assuredly good at keeping up the pretence of being in good humour while my mother refuses to let go off me and constantly bugs me with the sermons of intellect. As I swimmingly turned a deaf ear to my mother’s blustery speech( which was practically blowing me away) by trying assiduously hard to find solace in the enthralling and enrapturing ambience driving past the renowned golf course on M.A. Road, I happened to glance upon a towering, monumental tree. There was something mnemonic about the tree, it brought upon me an abrupt yet nauseating bout of nostalgia, the aroma (of dog-eared books resting in some niche on my bookrack on the brink of becoming mildewed) taking over my sensory perceptions and my eardrums ringing with only one word “The Whomping Willow”, the pugnacious tree in Harry Potter. A reminiscence which should otherwise have been the cause of a frenzy of euphoria became the crux for my discomfort because it was precisely at this moment that I heard my mother remarking in a dulcet “aren’t you glad you outgrew fantasy novels. Harry Potter is a passé now” and I scathingly heard the bitter emphasis of the name of my favourite novel. Arrrr! I had felt like throwing a tantrum in the car then, falling into hysterics, I was in the mood of a real crying jag...

Among the infinite vagaries of life adolescence is predominant. It is a transitional stage from the puerile and sometimes precocious infancy to the mature, experienced and at the same time corrupt and mercenary stage of adulthood. For a teenager it is a quest to not just unearth the morally right ingredients from the two extremes which adolescence is both sheathed as well as beleaguered by but also to inculcate a perfect concoction, a coalescence of qualities in one’s disposition. But for a teenage reader it is a purgatory where a spectre of inquisitiveness constantly hounds you and s/he has a fetish for reading the contentious Barbara Cartland, Mills and Boons, a thriller romance by Sidney Sheldon and of course the rage nowadays among young adults, known for her apt portrayal of   teenage romance and sexual alienation, Stephanie Meyer. The age of adolescence is in no way a moribund age, on the contrary, you are intrigued by the very thought of rebellion and would with alacrity become one yourself (the erratic teenage dalliances huh!). While our book racks are brocaded with books like Atlas Shrugged it seems a sacrilege, a blasphemy to read such books. We as teenage readers often imagine a conflict in our head between our conscience in the form of a white angel with a halo disseminating a divine luminescence and the doppelganger or the alter ego dressed in black. The former constantly raving at us not to read the tendentious literature while the latter shrieking a tirade at the other  to stop it from stopping us from reading the books .This conflict within us is so mind boggling that it adds to the stress by causing an adrenaline rush.

...I was standing in the middle of a desert where the sun was scorching, the breeze was gradually growing into a gale the likes of sirocco and I could feel it whipping past my face. My strands of hair were forming knots as if waging a war against each other to usurp the imperial throne of my forehead. I was weary and I knew it. There was a deadened sensation in my body as if it had been severed from my head. My throat was burning with thirst and it pained me a million knives when I tried to swallow. My oesophagus was practically wailing now, asking for H2O. I was straggling along to an oasis I could see in the distance straddled by palm trees. After a few more steps I could not take it anymore, I collapsed to the ground; my knees sank into the sand. I closed my eyes. It may have been hours or even decades when I opened them again to be looking at the huge canopy of a palm tree and an entire oasis looming large over me. I could not believe my eyes; in front of me lay a shimmering lake bound by a cascade on one side and a village on the other. I cupped my hand slowly letting them stretch towards the tranquil surface of the lake, letting the cool surface of the lake caress my palm, took some water into my hands and very carefully poured it down my throat. But on doing so, the acid in my stomach churned, my tongue turned bitter, acrid even, I felt like puking. I spat it out and when I looked at the ground below to see what the refuse had been it turned out to be,  not the glistening droplets of the elixir of life—water which I had supposedly poured down my throat but grains of sand. It had been a mirage, a hallucination. I was suffering from paranoia and the desert was playing its foul tricks on me...and then it came like a battering ram—the honking. I came back to my senses, I was still ensconced in my recluse beside the driver’s seat with my mother fervently honking at a male chauvinistic bus driver, who having seen a woman at the wheel, was absolutely refusing to let her overtake him. Initially I felt like lynching him but then I remembered the tortures at the bookshop and I smiled triumphantly. I was at the side of the bus driver today. I gazed at my lap where my new novels were basking in the sunlight peeping through the window and it fell upon the Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence. This was what M H Abram (the wiz with literary terms) would term as irony indeed. I read its blurb; the author was rebuking the taboo of virginity, not at all innocent I thought. It was then that I realized with dread what the mirage in my reverie had been symbolic of.
 I gulped. My fears were now manifesting themselves in my daydreams. I should have been braver having read the adventures of Robert Langdon in the labyrinthine streets of the Vatican City in Angels and Demons written by Dan Brown or the ingenious acumen and presence of mind of George Bevan in P.G. Wodehouse’s Damsel in Distress (a book I surreptitiously stole from my mother’s maternal home filled with literature booty which I am indubitably eager to plunder)or the mental dilemmas of Veronika in Veronika Decides to Die by Paul Coelho .Paul Coelho, I grunted under my breath with peevish displeasure, had benevolently dedicated an entire novel Eleven Minutes to the  subject. I thought about the fickle love of the protagonist of Angels and Demons and Da Vinci Code. This was one reason I loved Fyodor Dostoevsky for his portrayal of platonic love in Crime and Punishment or P.G. Wodehouse who with his subtlety of humour depicts what love truly means as opposed to the erotic love which most definitely was the forte of Ayn Rand or Dan Brown in his debut novel Digital Fortress .Or for that matter J.D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye which pivots around the protagonist’s rebellious adventures in the perilous world of night clubs and bars and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man which under the facade of being an objective portrayal of the partition of the sub-continent known for its variegated cultures  is also a rigmarole about the maturation of a young girl. I instantly drew an analogy between Ice Candy Man with Things fall apart by Chinua Achebe which was a canvas of Africa reeling under the vagaries of subjugation but began with a portrayal of pre-colonial times filled up to the brim with taboos including some I have grown averse to.  I ground my teeth with anguish. My mother deprecatingly glanced at me.  It is annoying the way mothers know you inside out, you are like an open book for them. She knew what I was thinking ( at times I thought she could use legilemency—the art of reading minds in the wizarding world of Harry Potter and with a pang I could feel the void in my chest, there was a gaping hole there since the time I had quit reading my favourite novel). She was about to say something but bit her lip and shook her head. “What!” I shouted, “It is repugnant to read such stuff”, I was in hysterics. She waited for a while and then said almost exasperated, “Life is a web of mingled yarn. An artist has an amoral perception of life and for this reason Shakespeare derives as much pleasure from the fact that his texts are simulacra of goodness as of evil.  Satan has been glorified in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

For every good facet of life there exists a bad one, for every yin a yang, for every white a black and it is a crisscrossing of both that makes the universe beautiful, how else would we indoctrinate the discretion between good and evil. Novels too are a pageant of both”.  I was reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “The Mountain and the Squirrel”-- the verses echoed in my head -:
But all sorts of things and weather
Must be taken in together
To make up a year
And sphere
I smiled; actually no I beamed as realisation dawned on me. I could now read Ayn Rand without that unsheathed dagger hanging ominously over my head-- guilt.