A Reader's Memoir 2

From the comics I stepped up to reading stories in the long form. At the teenage level I picked up Enid Blyton books. the Famous Five was my all time favorite. Stories of mystery and suspense never failed to trigger the adrenalin. I read book after book with absorbing interest. Chandamama in Telugu published interesting stories and my reading time divided between the two languages. They were entirely of a very different kind, but the stories written in simple language without literary acrobatics and sometimes illustrated served two purposes: no special vocabulary was needed to follow the story and no great feat of imagination was required to recreate the scenes in the mind. The comic strips made the transition from episodic format to a variety of stories in long and short forms.

The itch to read grew at a frenetic pace. To enter into an adult world became an urgent necessity. There were several factors at work here. The story must have an element of mystery, some adventure with suspense, and it must be something that adults read. The language also became a compelling attraction. English is the medium of instruction and in a Christian school a good knowledge of the language is very well appreciated. The native tongue having been relegated to just passing exams and speaking only at home, English assumed a predominant position. The vocabulary grew in response to the need to read. Words became easy to follow from the context and a dictionary at hand — dad kept an Oxford dictionary always on his reporter's desk. Reading and learning new words fueled each other.

Soon I started reading Perry Mason, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alistair McLean, Arthur Haley, Frederic Forsyth and others who wrote stories of this genre. Books from these authors became the daily feed to whet my appetite. What is common to these authors? Their stories were of men who belonged to our time, set in locales far from my own, about things that I never heard in a household, like war, court trial, murder mystery, assassination, corporate world, detective whodunit and so on. My romance with these books is 'seeing' things not there in my daily living. MI5, KGB, Holmes, Hitler, mercenary, lawyers and detectives — these words and more like them thrilled me no end.

Allied to my thirst for mystery and adventure (not of the historic kind, though) was another interest growing and found fulfillment in the books that took romance to the next level. It probably began with Irving Wallace — The Seven Minutes — and later sustained and even stoked further by Harold Robbins — The Carpetbaggers. The road quickly led south to books that provided more explicit content and imagery.






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