My mother bought me my first Enid Blyton, Mary Mouse Goes Up In A Balloon , when I was five and asked me at the bookshop to read the first two lines aloud and tell her if I understood. I gave her a half-insulted look and she immediately bought me one more book. My fauji father, on the other hand, preferred poring over maps rather than thick tomes, loading the family van with wife, children, buckets, clothes, provisions, sundry odds and ends, and setting off cross-country. And so the books I grew to love the most involved people moving about. I devoured the words that described the era, the changing landscapes, homes, clothes, modes of travel, food, even the companions — the setting of the story interested me more than the story itself.
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Rosy Is My Relative by Gerald Durrell was one of my favourites as a child; I even asked for a pet elephant for my birthday, and got the cutest stuffed one. I’d carry Rosy (of course, that’s what I named the toy) with me everywhere, especially on road trips. We’d act out passages from the book to entertain the family on holidays.
Intizar Husain’s Basti and The Sea Lies Ahead are also favourites. Both books focus on pivotal times in the Subcontinent and both involve movement, Lahore to Delhi to Dhaka to Rupnagar and Vyaspur in Basti or Karachi to Meerut to Lucknow to Delhi in The Sea ... Having grown up listening to similar stories of perilous journeys from the family, these books feel like I have a part of their souls for keeps.
My first copy of The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens was deliciously fat. Its cover depicted a few haves sitting around a table, while the most portly of them pontificated atop a spindly legged chair. It’s still my favourite Dickens book. While it had all the Dickensian elements of poverty and tragedy, it is still the funniest book I have ever read. Mr. Pickwick, Esq., the founder of the Pickwick Club, and his four closest friends decide to seek adventure away from London and take us along on an utterly mad journey full of ruffians, damsels in distress, new friends and confidants, evil conmen and corrupted officials. I love how quaint their way of travel was — the change of horses at different posts, cheese and ‘pettitoes’, getting along with the most dubious characters, peppered with liberal Samuel Wellerisms.
