Lucifer put on his overcoat, the chrome of his Colt Peacemaker revolver glistened for a while and then disappeared.
Someone is going to pay today... it has been 15 years now, it's payback time!!
Wrote this dialogue to portray the power of the written words… where we teleport ourselves into a world of our fantasies and imagination. Each one of us might visualize Lucifer in a different manner,
·         How old is he?
·         Who is he?
·         Why he took out the Colt Revolver? What is the bore? How it looks?
·         Why he has put on an overcoat? Is it cold? Rainy?
·         Which place he is in?
·         Was he a wronged person or is he a criminal?
·         What he was doing for past 15 years? Was he jailed? Or in a coma?
I’ve just started reading Amitav Ghosh’s first novel titled The Circle of Reason. I mainly read in the long Infy bus journeys and hardly able to turn a page during the weekends. During one such journey I just drifted into the memories of my school and the school library. Every Friday afternoon we were allowed to borrow books from the school library and it was my first serious foray into the beautiful and incredible world of books, novels, poems. My dad also had a medium sized library at home; his journalistic inclinations veered him more towards Assamese literature and more serious stuff which was a bit too much for a scrawny kid just promoted into 4th standard. When I grew up I finally realized the value of his collection. There were rare issues of TIME, SPAN and such foreign publication magazines dating back to the 70s, award winning Assamese novels and Assamese counterpart of the Reader’s Digest named BISHMOI etc. I remember reading Lost Horizon by James Hilton and was such in awe of the Paradise on Earth Shangri-La!! Those were the days when internet was unheard of and books were a constant companion. There were books on Osho and Super Consciousness and I just couldn’t comprehend it at all that time… left reading after 1-2 pages. The problem starts when we grow up and began to understand the essence and the nuances of words… during my B-school days a teacher recommended the book called The Autobiography of a Yogi… and it was such a spiritually uplifting book.
But then when you read/know too much you start to think too much and then starts the dissonance. You come up with many questions for which you can’t find an easy answer and then you start more, even in Infy buses… you start typing random lines in your mobile textpad and then try to find some coherence in them. And then you long for those bygone days, when as a kid you would jostle with your half-pant schoolmates and try to issue another action packed issue of the Hardy Boys, Famous 5 and The Three Investigators!!
Frank and Joe Hardy, Chet Morton and his yellow jalopy; Julian, Dick, Anne and George and Timmy the dog; Jupiter, Pete and Bob were such an integral part of my childhood memories. I would venture every week into castles, solve mysteries of the talking skull and bust a gang of art thieves. Those were innocent childhood fun times with a dosage of bravado, adventure and spine chilling moments. By the end of it all I and my friends managed to read almost all of Hardy Boys, Famous Fives and 3 Investigators.
Days turned into months and months into years… and I graduated from teen novels to books by Sidney Sheldon, Robin Cook, Jeffrey Archer and Sherlock Holmes (By Arthur Conan Doyle) and a bit from the Indian writers. Jhumpa Lahiri and Amitav Ghosh are a personal favorite as was Ayn Rand and Paulo Coelho (read almost 80% of their books). Ayn Rand’s lesser known book WE THE LIVING has a protagonist named Andrei Taganov who was tagged as A Communist Hero in an Anti-Communist novel  and that character, I feel, is the literary character I resemble the most… and he was finally the victim of his own idealism and more so for his love!
I woke up to Assamese novels quite late… perhaps as a 15-16 year old and there are a few ones worth mentioning… Kanchan Baruah’s Ashimot Jar Heral Seema (rough translation: Boundaries are lost in infinity) was a fantastic read and kept me engrossed. It had a mythical, magical feeling to it that was unparalleled.
The bus journey in the evening through the Hosur Road are less frustrating now… because I’m also traveling along with Alu, an orphan who flees Kolkata to Goa and then boards an illegal trawler to Africa… finding and then realizing that life comes a full circle and that every circle also has its own reasons!!
Here raising a toast to the magic of the written words!!
P.S Which literary character you resemble the most?? :-)
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