8
Because of childhood polio, the doctors had advised my parents not to send me to school.My life was pretty lonely until my private tutor, Mrs Penhero, gave me Louisa Alcott’s Little Women on my 11th birthday.
This was a magical moment in my life because it suddenly exposed loneliness to the alternate world of characters and the narratives woven around them. I found myself transported by the book into a state of excitement by the dramatic things that happened to the characters, who I imagined were real people, and the circumstances that affected their lives. Little Women launched me on a lifetime of compulsive reading.
As a young adult, I read books such as Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier. My young fantasy was caught up in the passionate characters portrayed in these stories and by the tension created by the predicaments their author’s managed to disentangle them from.
At around 13, I came upon Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. This was another watershed moment in my reading saga. I was enthralled by the humour imbedded in each line of Dickens’ book and enthralled by the good nature and pleasantness of it. Dickens spins his inimitable comic tale in impeccable English and expresses himself in an effortless way. I must have read the book at least thrice by the time I was 17. I tried to, but was unable to read anything else by Dickens except A Tale of Two Cities. I remember it being very sad but I’ve forgotten why I liked it. I’ve decided to reread it and have just downloaded it on my Kindle.
At about the same time I read Pickwick Papers, I was introduced to the hilarious world of Jeeves and Wooster, created by that peerless writer, P.G. Wodehouse. This is not so surprising because most people in the subcontinent who read English were, and still are, Wodehouse fans. I enjoyed Pickwick and Wodehouse so much that when it came to my own writing, I found I had almost ready access to writing comedy. I think my novel most affected by these books was The Crow Eaters.
I must mention here that comedy is much more difficult to write than tragedy — in fact, it is almost impossible to write comedy without an innate aptitude for it. I find comedy, with its attributes of intellect, wit and irony, to also be wise. Humour also allows one to express opinions and criticisms in a way that can be offensive otherwise. I find that comedy transcends the barriers of culture and bias.
Not that I read only comedy. A book I read with pounding heart and could not bear to put down was Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. I think I loved it so much for its authentic depiction of the innermost workings of a woman’s nature. In portraying Anna, Tolstoy touches on so many aspects of a woman’s psyche — of the pulse of her heart and of the inequities and taboos that tear at her, that his creation has stood the test of time and it will continue to do so.
Each time I reread it, I marvel at the accumulation of relevant details that make up the book; and at the same time, the writer spins the narrative out of such simple sentences and accessible prose that it has in it a touch of divinity. Make no mistake: this apparent simplicity is one of the hallmarks of fine writing.
Of course, I read a lot else besides these books, but I have named some of the books that influenced me most for their various merits, at an impressionable age.
Unfortunately, because of the divide between India and Pakistan, I had almost no access to Indian authors. When I chanced upon Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchables and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, I found myself relating to these books at a totally different level. Here were books written about people and landscapes and situations I knew and could empathise with. I still remember the sense of excitement and discovery within me as I read these books. Somewhat later, I came across A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul. I think I can count him among my very few favourite authors. There is one caveat, though: I like only his earlier works, preferring his fiction to his nonfiction. But an author all of whose work I like unreservedly is P.G. Wodehouse. And then I came across Pakistani author Sara Suleri Goodyear’s matchless autobiographical work, Meatless Days. There is a poetical brilliance to the book that works on a subliminal level that haunts the reader.
Much later, I came across Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz. I feel that, like Dickens, he has the capacity to create a whole world in which he immerses the reader. I felt he revealed the intricacies of life in Cairo, of its teeming bazaars, of the particular bent of mind of its characters and the culture that fashioned them, in a way that made me feel a sense of intimacy with the people living there. And although the book was very poignant, I found many of its pages and depictions of many of his characters hilarious. His is a touching humour. I tried to read the other books of his trilogy but I found that they could not compare with Palace Walk. In fact, when I taught creative writing at various universities in America, I assigned many of the books I have mentioned in the course I taught, “Humour in Novels”.
There are many other memorable books which I cannot mention in this short piece. Reading as much as I do, I have learnt to abandon the books that don’t captivate me early on. Life is too short, and my reading time on Earth especially so, to plough through books that do not hold me in some way.
I have definitely enjoyed reading detective fiction and spy novels such as John le Carre’s and Ken Follett’s novels. But by and large, I have been wary of bestsellers — many of them have proved disappointing. Having said this, three of my absolute favourite contemporary novels that have been on the bestseller lists almost forever, it seems, are the series by the Dutch writer, the late Stieg Larsson: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. There’s absolutely no humour at all in these books, but there is something so compelling about the petite girl, tattooed and pierced all over, with her punk leather clothes and hairstyle, her uncanny strength, intellect, and sheer indomitable courage, that makes us believe in the magic of the writer’s alchemy: making the incredible, credible.
