When I was young — at the age of 9-10 when I used to live with my grandparents in Ambala — I think I used to be a good storyteller. Telling stories was a good way of keeping the kids around me, who otherwise would run off to the maidan to play. Even if I went there, after a certain stage I couldn’t play their games.
There were two kinds of stories that could enrapture them for long periods: funny stories and scary stories. And somehow, all the stories involved me, and I wonder why they didn’t find it odd when I told them things like me getting lost in a desert, me getting buried under the sand, and people finding me when the sand bounced upwards when I sneezed. Prolonged guffaws would follow and immediate demands for a new story were made. Whether it was finding a way out of a haunted castle or chasing away 10 thieves by performing funny tricks (that scared them), I always told them stories in the first person, and they never asked me how come I managed all those feats when I could not even play with them in the maidan. Lost in the territories of chimerical evocations, sometimes even I used to lose the sense of reality and actually think that I had had all those experiences. It was my way of traveling to different places and experiencing the stuff dreams are made of, perhaps.
It’s easier to imagine things when you are young because the unctuous intellect doesn’t require you to put every brocade of fantasy under the scanner of reasoning. You can be buried under the sand, and you can sneeze without inhaling the sand and choking yourself to death. Once you grow up, once you begin to perceive and assimilate the world around you, the detritus of logic asphyxiates your feral spirit.
Today somewhere I read about JK Rowlings and all these old fantasy-ridden thoughts came back to invoke the dormant memories when I didn’t have to think hard to come up with a story, and the words didn’t become the portcullises that blocked my passages. In fact I can remember now, when I couldn’t come up with appropriate words (I couldn’t even read/write those days) I used to make do with expressions and strange sounds. The more words I learned, the farther my stories went from me. My experiences, my understandings became the invisible dusters that always wiped my blackboard whenever I tried to write something on it Anyway, coming back to JK Rowlings, one really has to have an imagination with indefatigable wings to write about something that is so unworldly, that always brims with magical conjurations. And on top of that, keep it so engaging that she has to write multiple books and every book is a bigger hit than the previous one. I have read none and I have no plans of reading any of them, but it is not because of any inherent disliking for her or for her genre.
I’ve read so little till now, I’ve written so less till now, that I’ve begun to panic, which means that I have to prioritize every hour I spend reading and writing. I’m not worried about writing actually, I’m more worried about reading. Reading is that training those monks get in the Shaolin temple; but they join the temple at a very young age. So my greatest disadvantage is time. The casualty: JK Rowlings’ books. At least as of now.
I’ll write more about this…
