On Reading

How a little girl found home in books!

I have been itching to write about my reading journey, especially since I started The Book Thief—a story of a little girl who found peace in words and stole books during World War 2.

Growing up, I never had dolls or girly things. I didn’t even know that girls play with such delicate entities. I preferred playing cricket and reading books. And to my delight, my eldest brother had a library on the top floor of our house. I used to sneak and steal books from his library. Not all of them were age-appropriate, so I wasn’t allowed to read everything. I must have been around seven or eight years old. But I kept stealing books and reading them throughout my childhood.

It was a traditional household in a small, townish area of Asia, where reading wasn’t cherished the way it should have been. As I grew a little older, my mother would ask me to go clean the room, and I’d take a book and spend the whole day immersed in its magic. This, of course, only fueled my mother’s fury when she’d find me sitting in the middle of a mess with a book in my hands. But she was a gentle woman who had always wanted to go to school as a child, but never got the chance. She would walk away, leaving me with my book and the mess, accompanied by a warning to clean it all ASAP.

For me, stories were life. Written words spoke to me and took me to places where imagination would meet reality. It’s still a nice feeling visiting those early years of my life. So full of books. It was the kind of life where I did not have much space of my own. Not in the physical sense, and not in the emotional one either.

But I had books. And they were enough to fill all the spaces.

I always had a book under my pillow. I just felt safer with them on my side. I read into the night with a flashlight. It was my first love that kept me awake.

Summers are still longer in that part of the world, and I can recall those summer afternoons where everybody would take a nap, and I’d read a book. There was a strange kind of solace in the written words. There still is.

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that books held the key to a happy, golden land. They took my hand and introduced me to people without requiring me to utter a single word. I have always been an introvert (I’m good at masking, so people sometimes mistake me for an extrovert), and face-to-face conversations take a lot of effort for me. Books are the only place in the world where I can be part of a conversation without feeling the pressure to say anything. I become an observer. A companion.

Now, when the world moves either too fast or too slow, I sit down, open my book and find my rhythm. I read to stay sane. To stay hopeful.

And then at times, when life happens in all its strangeness, books help me find sanity. They never leave me alone. They give me hope. They give me wisdom. They give me power. Of words. Of information.

Here’s to Reading.