READING BOOKS, TELLING STORIES, WRITING LETTERS AND ME
One of my nephews, Harshul Nayak, shared this on his timeline on Face book:
“One of the sad realities today is that very few people, especially young people, read books. Unless we can find imaginative ways of addressing this reality, future generations are in danger of losing their history,” Nelson Mandela.
And it gave me fodder for my current article. Yes, indeed very few people read books. However, we were some of those few who do read. Like our mother, all of us, my sisters and me, are voracious readers and read everything that comes in our hands. There is a funny side to this reading habit of ours, but that's another story. This habit has helped me in telling stories.
Story telling is an integral part of growing up and the bond that connects cultures across the world. With the size of the families shrinking and living spaces becoming exclusive, many families in the cities do not have anyone to tell children stories, which people like you and me, heard from our mother and grannies. My children had been lucky too. My mother was a very good story teller and she passed this knack of story-telling down to all of us, to all her five children. She would narrate her childhood stories, her mysterious experiences, stories from the movies and stories from Baburao Arnalkar’s ‘Detective stuff’. Just like my mother Jaini mami, my maternal aunt, was a good story teller. Their story telling sessions were fantastic, both would modulate their voices to match different characters from their stories, there would even background scores, giving you goose-bumps and making you shriek at times or making you laugh till your stomach ached and eyes watered. They would take you inside the story, making you a part of it. My mother also inculcated in me this good habit of reading. I have always been a good listener and a good reader and it helped. Even as a child, I think, I was fairly good at it; I could spin a yarn at the drop of a hat. I would make my own stories. After reading Gulliver’s Travel, I had my own version. I would tell my cousin, Jyoti, how I had got lost in a jungle during our school picnic and how I came across some Lilliputian people, size of my thumb and mind you I must have been around eight or ten years of age and she three –four years my junior. I had my own adventures in that jungle. I had also told her how I had brought back some of these tiny people and their tiny pets and kept them hidden in my drawer without telling anyone about it. She believed every word of mine. She would ask me often to show them to her and each time I would get away by promising to show them to her ‘someday’ until she came up to our house and insisted, “Vinay, where are those tiny people and their pets?”
“Just yesterday, Aai (mother) disposed off the cupboard to a ‘bhangar walla’ (scrap merchant) and my tiny friends too went along with it. No one knows about it and would never know,” I replied promptly, “I am very sad.” There were actually tears in my eyes, I am sure, when I told her about losing my imaginative tiny friends (I deserved an ‘Oscar’).
I remember another funny incidence. I would often read detective fictions. I was fascinated by Erle Stanley Gardner, be it his Perry Mason defending seemingly indefensible defendant (especially a lady in distress) with the aid of secretary Della Street and investigator Paul Drake or his ‘Donald Lam and Bertha Cool’ episodes which he wrote under his pen name ‘A.A.Fair’. I loved reading ‘James Hadley Chase’. I was equally fascinated by बाबुराव अर्नाळकर ह्यांच्या धनंजय - छोटू व काळापहाड कथा in Marathi. So I decided to try my hand at writing detective fictions. I must have been in eighth or ninth then. I mixed E.S. Gardner, James H. Chase and Baburao Anarnalkar, churned all the Perry Masons, Dellas, Drakes, सारे Dhananjays (धनंजय), Chotus (छोटू) आणि Chandravadans (चान्द्रवधन) put together and I had my own recipe, a six-seven pages of my own detective fiction, written in Marathi. But as luck would have it, these pages landed in the hands of my sister, Usha. She showed it our eldest sister, Pushpa. Look on their faces said it all. But utter astonishment, they called my other sister.
"शुभानि! हे काय लिहिले आहेस?" they summoned her in this manner.
"किती अशुद्ध. र्हस्व- दीर्घ ह्यांचा काही तुला समज आहे की नाही? जे लिहिले आहेस ते चांगले आहे पण भाषेचे काय? मराठीतून शिकून सुद्धा तुझे मराठी इतके अशुद्ध कसे?" पुष्पा आणि उषाचे बिचारीला बौद्धिक डोस पाजणे चालू होते. Poor Shubha was going through this intellectual torture and all because of me.
Shubha asked them to show those papers to her.
" बघू मला. हे अक्षरच मुळात माझे नाही," she was trying to defend herself and even Perry Mason, I bet, would have failed in his mission to defend her.
"मग काय हे विनयने लिहिलाय? तो कसा काय लिहिणार. माहित आहे ना तो सेंट SEBASTIAN मध्ये जातो, नाही का? अंग्रेजी मध्यम, नाही काय ग, पुष्पा?" Usha was prosecuting her. I imagined her to be Hamilton Burger, the district attorney himself (oops herself).
"होय, उषा तेंव्हा आम्हाला खात्री झालाय. शुभा,तूच लिहिले आहेस! कबुल कर," Pushpa announced her verdict and I imagined her as a judge in her black robe, a white wig on her head and grave and stern face to go with it, striking the hammer or gravel and declaring, “Guilty!”
I felt sorry for my sister. However, I remained silent. I haven’t disclosed that I was the owner of those few pages till this day. But then budding Marathi writer in me was thus stifled, the desire in to write in Marathi being nipped in the bud itself.
Nevertheless, I continued with my story- telling activity, throughout my younger days telling stories to my cousins, who would also lend me their patient ears, especially my cousin Dilip, and continued to do so in my adulthood as well, telling stories to my own children as well as other children, sometimes reading books / fairy tales / adventures and other stories for them and making them read as well. And I still enjoy telling stories even now, especially to Sarah, my grand-daughter. Once, she was about three years or so. We, my wife and I, were visiting them in Sharjah (in the UAE) and we, my wife and me, would tell her stories in turns during her bedtime. It was my turn that night. After telling her ‘n’ number of stories I was about to sleep when she exclaimed, “ बाबा, स्तोली बोलो!"
“Why should I say sorry?” I asked.
But again she repeated, “ बाबा, स्तोली बोलो, प्लीज.”
“But tell me why should I say sorry to you,” I almost shouted at her “I haven’t done anything wrong, have I?”
“Baba, not sorry, स्तोली, राजा और रानीकी स्तोली!"
“Oh! So you want a story of a king and a queen.”
“ Yes, Baba!” Then she slept in my lap and the smile on her face gave me immense happiness.
Today Sarah is eleven plus and now when we visit them in Saudi she reads and tells us stories that she has read. She too has picked up the art of story-telling and my heart swells with pride! Some years back she had phoned me to tell, " Baba, I got the first prize in story telling competition in school."
"Wow! What was the story?" I asked.
"Baba, the one, you had told me once. It's bout a bear and two men,"the eight year was telling me proudly,"How his so called friend climbed a tree and abandoned him as a bear approached them. How he pretended to be dead when the bear came near. I remembered the whole story. How he told his friend what the bear had whispered in his ears, 'Never trust a selfish friend, who deserts you at difficult time'. Baba,everybody clapped when I had finished telling the story. Baba, I want hear some more stories - when are you and Aai coming here?"
We are still there for our grand child to tell stories and to listen to her stories. I always encouraged my children to read everything, but kept them away from those American comics at least in their formative years, till the kids were thorough in Grammar and advised my son to do likewise.
As a child, I was scared of reading comics. And there were some elders in the family who would make me read them and would laugh at my pronunciations, made fun of me and they seemed to enjoy watching me wince. Satirical fellows? Sadists, you would call; but at that age I did not know that word. But I must confess I simply couldn't read or understand those colloquial phrases and words. And some of them still live in their wicked world and still think that I take assistance from children to write all this. Now tell me who haven't grown.
'I GONNA DO', 'I DUNNO', I'M PURTY SURE; 'FEITERS BREAKIN'JAIL', 'VAMOOSE', 'THAT GAL'------------all these were simply beyond my understanding,at least then.So my friends if you give your kids these comics to read, you read out to them explain these phrases and words and tell them what's correct.
I was totally aghast to learn that some city schools have included lessons on Internet acronyms and emoticons in their English syllabus. I am horrified when kids use this lingo (oops, pardon me for using foreign email language) in their essays and letters as well. But now they have official permission to so. They will soon learn '2 write lyk ds wey in der scul'. Why just in School? They may even use it at home. Don't be surprised to find on the door of your teenage kid's room, a tag reading 'DND' for 'Do no disturb' sign. They will not write in complete sentences and may soon forget the correct spellings of the words.But don't ever ridicule them even they write 'ridikulas', correct them instead.
As I have said or rather written that story telling is an integral part of growing up. However, there are other children who are not so fortunate as yours or my kids. There is no one at home to tell them stories. Their mother and father come home late from work and have no time or energy to tell them stories. They certainly miss their grand- parents. The digital revolution may have filled this gap to some extent. There are DVDs and animated videos of children stories. But all these gadgets are just mechanical. There is no ‘Life’ or 'Soul' in them. These devices can’t react to the child’s response to the story or can't answer the child's innocent questions.
Now I shall dwell on 'Letter Writing', which is no doubt a lost art, but my favourite. What do expect with advance technology. The telephone and the fax, the telegraph and the emails have completed the destruction of the art of letter-writing. But I loved this art even when I was school going kid. My journey into the letter-writing world began when I joined the 'Pen Friends Club'. (Yes, they had such clubs then) I must have been in seventh or eighth then. My first pen friend was an American girl, who was more interested in exchanging gifts than views and thoughts. Our wave lengths did not match, and her frequent requests for gifts were beyond my pocket,which was empty most of the time anyway ('pocket-money' concept was unheard of in our house and my children too never had this luxury). So I ceased to write her letters.In the meantime I had also cultivated another pen friend, purposefully selecting a matured college going guy, who was five-six years my senior. To impress him I had once written to him thus:
Dear Ravi,
Isn't that your name? Ravindrakumaram Kuriakose is all very well, but you see when you are dreadfully busy in studies for X exams (as currently I am), you will certainly have no to time write such long names; particularly when it takes you more than an hour to remember how to spell it. Again there is another difficulty you may face - of finding the 'Malayalam-English & English - Malayam' Dictionary. Do you have one? Even if you do have such a dictionary, you have to actually find it, then see if you have spelt the name correctly, which will come only after you have made out which is dictionary and which is dust and there is job of finding where 'R' in Malayalam be located. So with all this bother that I may have to undergo, I am sure that you won't mind my writing it short and calling you 'Dear Ravi'-----
Whether he was impressed or not, I do not know. But he did write to me several letters and most of them were on similar lines, about his college life, his science subjects, how he found it difficult to grasp physics and how he was totally lost in maths. With all his difficulties he did manage to move forward and was now in Engineering College. Gradually his letters became infrequently frequent.Then suddenly one day I received a letter from his married sister, Rohini. She wrote:
Dear Vinay,
I am Ravi's eldest sister. Ravi is busy in his studies. Even if he wasn't, he would hardly write. He doesn't love writing letters. It was me who pushed him into it. He wrote all those letters to you and his several pen friends, but they were my thoughts. It made me feel young, about 15-20 years younger, about your age. I am in my forties and you must around 16-17, right? I liked what you write and written so far. We, my husband and me, have often read together your letters (to my brother.Anyway he hardly ever reads them.).
Vinay, one thing I would like to tell you, like an elder sister would to her younger brother, is that to write a good letter you must approach the job in the lightest and most casual way. You must be personal, not abstract. You must not say, "This is too small a thing to put down." You must say, "This is just the sort of small thing we talk about at home. If I tell them this they will see me, as it were, they'll hear my voice, they'll know what I'm about." You could write about how your sisters had laughed at your bad jokes.If you intend to write such volumes you must know it will be impossible for you to keep any order or method in what you write; that will come first which is uppermost in your mind, not that which is uppermost in your heart--. A letter written in this fashion eliminates distance; it continues the personal gossip, the intimate communion (sharing of thoughts, in case do not know what communion is), that has been interrupted by separation ( you may be physically present); it preserves one's presence in absence. It cannot be too simple, too commonplace, too colloquial. Its familiarity is not its weakness, but its supreme virtue. If it attempts to be orderly and stately and elaborate, it may be a good essay, but it will certainly be a bad letter. Perhaps you may not understand all this right now, but one day you will.---- she went on telling me about Ravi's progress, his completing of graduation, how he had secured addmission in MBA and finally signing off as --Yours ever loving sis Rohini.
Subsequently, we exchanged several letters. I had completed my B.Sc. Her letters had ceased coming. Then I received a letter from her husband informing me that she was dead. She had never ever mentioned in her letters to me that she had been suffering for several years, suffering from leukaemia. Rohini, may her soul rest in peace!
During my college days my classmate, Farooq Ruknodian, would send letters from Cape Town,South Africa,where he would go during our vacations. He wrote about the Apartheid, about the beauty of the Afrikaans and about his beautiful country and its wild life. After graduation he left India for good and never came from his native country and never written to me since then.
Another college classmate on mine, Neville Mistry would write good letters, about our college days, his Karate Workshops, movies and a lot of varied subjects. Now he writes letters no more to me, but sends emails to me of 'Forwards' (some of them are quite interesting) he receives from others or some 'copy- paste' quotes, and sometimes sends me sms, like 'Happy Birthday', Happy Diwali or some other festival', 'Thnks', etc. on my mobile. But that personal touch is missing.
Francis is a close friend and a colleague. We worked together in Chowgule's. Subsequently he went to Saudi Arabia and was working there for more than thirty years in ARAMCO. He too wrote good. letters. He had an eye for details. His letters were always clean, neat, orderly and yet quite interesting. In his very first letter he had written how different (as compared to working here in India) it was working there and how satisfying it was to work under an American boss. Now he began to write 'I've a very busy Sketjule (for schedule)' Our colour was replaced by his color. But otherwise he hadn't changed. He was impressed by the typewriter that he was using, some electronic variety; he had even sent me a type-written letter. About his boss he had written thus:
He is small and stout (a rare feature for an American), with short arms,short legs and a round head with a red pimply face, planted direcly on his trunk, which is also round and short, and with apparantly no neck, which gives him a froggish appearance. But don't go by his looks. Beneath that thick round there is a very sharp and clever brain and under that thick and stout chest there is a kind heart. When he appreciates your work he gives solid pat on your back or even hugs you and exclaims, "Very nice work,pal!" I feel very embarrassed when he does this. (That's my shy and modest fellow!)
Now you must have realized what I meant when I said he had an eye for details.
This then is all my take on READING BOOKS AND STORIES, TELLING STORIES AND WRITING LETTERS.
My friends, I shall always remain wordfully (THERE IS NO SUCH WORD, I BELIEVE.) yours ever – VINAY TRILOKEKAR
