I have been reading, reading a lot and as far as I can remember I have always related to the characters, no matter how good or grey, a sense of empathy had always gotten the better of me. There have been instances when I would lock myself up, weep and feel the pain, relate to the good guy going through his ordeals of life and love, perhaps I failed to realise it was just but fiction. But, then I was too young to understand that life had harder storylines to offer.
Tragic endings had always fascinated my mind, I always understood that Macbeth was a tragic hero, not everyone at the tender age of 8 could feel the same, although that made me nothing extraordinary, I could feel the pulse of the character to an extent. Perhaps, my solitude: something that I loved even as a child helped me in connecting a few dots, but this turned out to be a blessing in the long run.
Often, my imaginations were fueled by the desire to attain the kind of perfection as found in the books, Baba had to once break open the loo to get me out, I had locked myself inside, too busy reading David Copperfield, I was. The struggles of David as a child and his love for Dora: something that fascinated me at 10.My parents had always tried to inculcate the habit of reading in me, little did they realize that it would go on to shape my imagination and my thirst for achieving something as tragic if not glorious.
Happy endings and fairy tales, always seemed superficial, but there was something about a tragedy: a kick; a thrill and an unfulfilled desire that drove ambition, fired the soul to carry on and made the mind to stay focused. It kept the reader and the character grounded, in touch with the realities that existed. No good over evil, no love over hatred; plain truth without any pinch of salt. Salt of the earth, ahh !! The good being crippled by the bad, no tales of heroic glorification, just an ending that would make the mind wander and wonder: why and why not.
And, then the affair began: the admiration of anything tragic, a loveless lover or a jobless loner, cut off and away from all the gloss that life and luck could offer, living their lives and battling their fate. As far as I could remember, I dreamt of being something of a tragic hero too, being applauded seemed too superficial, for it would be curtains down any time, how about living a life loving and longing, the mind being fed by this constant drip of assertion and evaluation.
And, a tragedy did strike, I might well be on the course of living it; nothing unrequited, nothing cursed by the Goddess of destiny. The doing of all that I read, the assimilation of all the characters I romanticized. She’s here, we won’t stay, but the words will. A story etched on my soul, I shall pass it on.
The books that I read, the characters my mind immortalized, the tales of unfulfilled desires I so admired have finally rewarded me with something blissful, the presence of someone whose presence wouldn’t manifest into reality. The 10 year old in me would have cried his heart out, I now know why books just don’t shape your mind, often they shape your destiny too. I wouldn’t have been happier.
P.S: It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.
~ Love in the time of cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
abhishek purkayastha 