tales of Suchita

Dehradun 2004.

I was in school and had just discovered the marvels of reading. A friend and I used to reach school before anyone else and we spent those fifteen minutes in bliss, discussing Famous Five and Nancy Drew. We had made a pact that she and I would buy different titles so we could swap books.

We didn’t have a library in Dehradun but we had second hand bookstores that would take your old books and let you take different books to read. Thanks to mom, we would go there almost every week and I didn’t ever run out of books.

While what really got the six of us, meaning my circle of friends from school, close was Harry Potter [which deserves a post of its own and may get one. I’m still debating between it and Macbeth], there was another author who was a big deal at the time – Meg Cabot.

MT, who used to live in a posh locality in Dehradun [to those who know such stuff, it was Vasant Vihar], was a member of an equally posh library. There, she picked up Teen Idol with its vibrant pink cover and an American high school romance which none of us could really fathom.

Schools didn’t have uniforms? Schools had locker rooms? Boys and girls actually talked and flirted with each other?!

For the last point, I must give context. Our class, or specifically, our division Class VIII B had the peculiar problem of boys and girls not engaging with each other – at all. It left our teachers baffled and any attempts to rectify the situation was met with a strong opposing teenage force.

So you can imagine how novel it was to read about a teen romance in a book.

But what was even more novel was that we were six of us who wanted to read the book and the book was available to us only for one week. It didn’t occur to us that our friend could reissue the book. It didn’t occur to us that we could find other means to read the book. It didn’t occur to us that those numbers – 6 people, 7 days – was a kind of math that was undoable.

We were on a mission and we all had to read that book and we all had to finish it in that one week otherwise unspeakable things could happen!

The things that stand out to me the most about the passing the parcel that we played with the book was how tickled my mother was with what we were doing, how I had to read the last fifty pages while sitting in a rattling auto on my way to school – I had to pass it on to the next one in the cycle – how careful we all were handling the book and the way we swooned over the actor-person-character in the book. We all had a crush on him I think. Maybe one of us had it on some other character. Hmmm I wonder if they’d remember if I asked.

There was another book that took us with the same frenzy. It was called Forever by Judy Blume. It was a book on teen sexuality and since my friend had been too chicken to issue the book from her library – but not chicken enough to tell us about it – I had had to keep the name in my head, hold onto it, and then boldly tell mom I wanted to buy a book on sex. She said yes, obviously. Mother was cool that way. Unless she thought this would be an easier way to avoid the sex talk. I think I still have the book unless I threw it away. I really need to clean my bookshelf.

God that week had been something else. I don’t think we actually did anything productive in it except read, pass on the book, and dream about our own love stories.

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I’m taking my blog to the next level with Blogchatter’s My Friend Alexa. For the next 1 month, I’ll be sharing some of my favourite bookish memories; hence the title Reading Tales.