Imaginations. Or Not.

My parents sorely lack imagination. Their thoughts are centred on facts and their dreams are rooted in reality.

Funny they made me.

In one of his in-service trainings, my dad was asked to close his eyes and imagine a completely different life for himself. One of those irritating, time-consuming HR soft skills classes that are designed to throw you for a loop, sure, but he was at a loss. He did not know how to do it. So he closed his eyes and slept. He came back and said: we had a nap today. The story only came out when we pressed for more details because it seemed unlikely that a bunch of senior IPS officers would be gathered in a room mid-day and asked to take a nap.

My mother is no different. She hates people who play dead persons onscreen or onstage. Other than this aversion to playing dead people, she is a terror to watch movies with. She makes nasty side comments all throughout movies. God forbid if the actors cried. She gets really pissed when people act like they were sad when they were probably not. Or vice versa. Acting! she’d exclaim; all lies!

Last year, one quiet afternoon at home in Aizawl, I told them a story about stars and demons. They listened in captive silence for length. Then they asked me where this happened. I said I had not come up with the details concerning locations. They understood then that it was fiction that I had personally made up. They stared at me. I stared at them. We blinked once or twice. Wordlessly, they returned to their chores.

This is by no means an isolated event. One time, dad joined me for my morning walk along the North Khawbung road in Champhai. We reached a beautiful clearing from where we could see a jungle thicket. I remarked how very like a giant broccoli it looked. He stayed politely silent. He did not see it. Talk about failure to launch!

Or there was that time the pair of them saw an old, almost-dead jackfruit tree by the river Siang in Arunachal Pradesh. They made the driver stop the car. Together, they mused about how lonely the tree looked, how much joy it must surely have given so many people in its time, and now it was dilapidated and standing where only the sun would see it. They tried to weave poetic around it and compose a song. They failed. They just got back to the car and left.

I make a big deal out of this because the both of them are deeply religious and spiritual. Whatever difference between the two you want there to be. It is paradoxical to me that someone operating with that kind of faith system should lack imagination to this degree! Or maybe they just don’t want to indulge. Maybe the latter.

I think about myself in respect to them a lot. I live my life in my head and only return to reality when I must. Even so, even operating on such different systems, they’ve supported me swimming in fantasies and helped me build my library of fiction. Only last week they saw my moonwater and were baffled but they simply accepted it as a me thing. I think I still have a lot to learn from them.

Not As Much As Lord Voldemort

I made my dad stand in line for the sixth Harry Potter book. It was from a bookstore in Sarojini Nagar market in Delhi, before it was all swanky and shit. It was my first completely new Harry Potter book; all my first five copies had been bought second-hand. I don’t remember but I wouldn’t be surprised if dad had bought me the book as a reward for having gotten good grades; that had always been our way.

My parents have never understood my fascination for fiction. My dad lives in a world of responsibility, always taking it just a little bit too seriously. My mum has not a superstitious bone in her body, despite being deeply spiritual, which is a paradox (which she doesn’t find to be so). Neither of them takes time out of their hands to indulge in fiction and imagination and the fanciful world of paranormal fiction. Except for a couple of ghost stories, of course – my dad with his ‘I once gave a ride to an Old Lady Ghost’ and my mum’s ‘I once saw a chhawihfa when I was working in Durtlang hospital but it was probably methane’ stories.

Be that as it may, they’ve always said: If she is reading, it is better than not reading. There has never been a ban on any material. My mum did show signs of concern back when people said Harry Potter promoted witchcraft or some such bull. But even then, she never banned it. I read whatever fiction I could find. My first full-blown novel was The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas which might explain my fascination for gruff men who are far too brilliant for their own good. I might have been ten; I’d say that was a bit young for The Count but like I said, there were no rules. As long as I was reading, it was A-OK.

I read Enid Blyton after Sidney Sheldon, Doctor Faustus and Mills & Boon novels! That was not right. But it still worked. I liked the stories. Whatever I didn’t understand, I simply glossed over.

I never thought I’d be done with comics because I devoured any I could lay my hands on: Archies, Asterix, Biker Mice From Mars, Cartoon Network comics, Chacha Chaodhury, DC, Marvel, Phantom, Photoromances, Richie Rich, Tinkle, Tintin... any and everything. But lately, I can’t seem to bring myself to be engaged in them. Maybe I am getting old. This is new.

In 2011, my mum mused aloud that I read so many books yet never seemed to finish reading the Bible. That got me thinking. I said I’d give it a go. She bought me a small, pocket-friendly, leather-bound NIV Bible and I read it everywhere. It starts out nice with magical stories, gets a bit slow going after a point, but then with the songs and poems in the middle, it finds its ground again, ending with a bang. I’ve been re-reading it annually ever since. I am partial to some parts; not a big fan of some parts.

There are a few other books I continually re-read; January is for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. I have re-read a lot of my old books; I consider it catching up with old, dear friends.

And every September, without fail, I return to Hogwarts, as we Potterheads say; via re-reading the books, basically. I remember my first time reading Philosopher’s Stone. It was in the girls’ hostel of SDA Inter-College Roorkee. My friend Meenu got sent the first two books by her grandfather (I think?) and she lent them to me. I was hooked from the line, “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” Yes, thank you very much.

I snuck out of the Lady Shri Ram Residence Hall for the seventh book with a few friends from college who I remain friends with to this day. There was that whole Midnight Release which because it was simultaneous across the globe, meant about 6:30AM for us in India. Actually, Harry Potter helped me make my first friends in college. We were a group of Freshers standing outside the LSR Auditorium and someone mentioned Harry Potter and a bunch of us just gravitated toward each other. These were the peeps I broke hostel rules with and standing in line with at that bookshop in GK-II that morning. Thanks, Potter.

Addiction is not always a good thing. But as Daniel Radcliffe said, it could be drugs. So I’m still doing OK, I guess. There’s just something so comforting about books, especially fiction.

I’m not the biggest fan of non-fiction but I’m trying out memoirs, biographies, travel and science books. They can be fun. I’d like to one day brag about some heavy literature I can quote offhand as a party trick. For now, I don’t really gravitate to literature that teaches you things. I’ve always preferred something ‘to enjoy’ rather than ‘to accumulate’, as in knowledge. Any wisdom I gain from my reading is ever only incidental.

Fiction works for me because in fiction, things make sense. Which is not always the case in real life. It is an escape, yes. But it can also be a way to learn many of life’s lessons without having to personally make many mistakes. Of course, some mistakes in life you make on your own because they are delicious. Wink wink.

I’ve always been interested in fiction. Some might even call it an obsession. I do not deny it. I’ve made my peace with it and I think it is okay. It is not as much as Lord Voldemort with Harry Potter anyway.