Breaking the Spell

At last I did it.

Long back - no not that long back - say 4-5 years back I was a voracious reader. I used to gulp down books- along with the covers- week in and week out. As the days went by I grew sick and tired of consuming numerous quantities of Sidney Sheldons and Michael Crichtons. Guided by a friend I turned my attention to philosophy. And within months Jostein Gaarders’ “Sophie’s world” and Ayn Rands’ “Fountainhead” and the voluminous “Atlas shrugged” were behind me. I achieved such feats by literally living with the books. I was very serious with my hobby and never let academics interfere with it. So you can easily picture me, sitting in the last bench of the classroom, lost inside the world in which the characters of the book in my hand existed.

But all this changed as the years went by. That was when a witch cast her nasty spell on me. I lost my ability to complete any of the books that I took up. Nevertheless it did not stop me from buying books (May be that was a part of the spell as well). I seemed to suffer from some compulsive disorder when it came to books. Walking on the side-paths I froze at the sight of the numerous, old, dog-eared, tattered books on the vendor’s pushcart. I froze at the sight of a book exhibition. I froze at the Landmark and I froze at the Odyssey. Thomas Hardy’s “Far from the Madding crowd”, J.R.R Tolkein’s “Lord of the Rings”, Charles Dicken’s “Great Expectations”, John Steinback’s “Grapes of Wrath”, Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor” and “Hunt for the Red October”, Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly effective people”, Robin Sharma’s “The monk who sold his Ferrari”, Stephen Spielberg’s “Close encounters of the third kind”, Harrold Robin’s “The Carpet baggers”, R.K.Narayan’s “The Writerly Life”, George Elliot’s “Silas Marner”, Salman Rushdie’s “Shalimar the Clown”, Power Vocabulary, Oxford Pocket Dictionary, The Economist-Style Guide and a few more. The old wooden table lying in the corner of my little bedroom started creaking and cracking as the load mounted. I never was able to pick up one book and complete it. I kept alternating within various stories. I started living in multiple worlds as I moved from the Middle Earth to the Los Angeles, Kashmir to Wessex and Malgudi to the Himalayas. I went on a spiraling crazy, mind numbing reading spree.

And then it stopped. I made it to stop.

I decided to take on the witch. Face to Face.

I walked up to my old wooden table and for the first time realized the number of books I had accumulated over the years, no…months no…days. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

I fished out Salman Rushdie’s “Shalimar the clown” and sat down to read. I read, read and read. I read into the nights and I read out of the mornings. A few days back, 2 days to be precise… I did the incredible. I did the marvelous and I did the unbelievable.

I finished the book.

Phew! That was one crazy spell to break and now that I have broken it I am all the more relieved and confident.

Coming to “Shalimar the Clown” it is a complex book and a simple book. Complex in the hefty ideologies, political overtones, history of the world so on and so forth. Simple in the beauty of the description of a love between a Muslim boy and a Hindu girl gone awfully wrong, description of the beauty of Kashmir, harmony of the bygone days, the ugly face of militancy and the atrocities of the Indian army. It is a story of love. It is a story of deception. It is a story of revenge.

Rusdie’s language and style of writing is like the river Muskadoon appearing in the story. Unrestrained, turbulent and overflowing. He has a way with the words and he plays around with it to achieve the desired effect. The beautiful valleys of Kashmir, the love making scenes of the lead couple in the meadows of Khelmarg, the brutality of the Indian army’s crackdown in the village of Pachigam and the LeP’s atrocities in the village of Shirmal: all are given birth in your imagination as you flow through the narrative.

All said and done, it is a fact that it was a difficult book to read- at least initially. The language was too dense and the writing style- totally alien. But once you somehow manage to break into the hard sheets of ice on the top of the river of his language, you are swept away with the velocity of the narrative.

Okay, let me stop here.

After all I have to get back home and start reading Arundathi Roy’s “The God of Small things”

Oh! Did I mention that I got enrolled in the local library near my house?