J.R.R. Tolkien came into my world on a windy February
evening when my father walked into my room, freshly returned from a tour to
Chandigarh trying to sell multicoolers. I had a copy of The Fellowship of
the Ring in my library.
As I dived in, having never heard of JRRT before, I loved
the name Bilbo Baggins and I just could not stop reading. I read about
Gandalf’s fireworks, about how the journey to Rivendell was thought of and
executed and of course I marvelled at the burden Frodo was made to carry. I think
it took me about a week to finish the book, because of schoolwork, but luckily,
my parents always encouraged reading in me and let me stay up late finishing
books. “Lights out!” was an exclamation I never heard.
A year later, for my tenth birthday, I got the complete one
volume edition of The Lord of the Rings and I was off. My birthday was
in October and I spent winter of that year lost in the realm of Middle-Earth.
To this day, I get chills when I read of Gandalf’s encounter with the Balrog
and how it allowed him to ascend to his true form, I want to be there when the
Entmoot happens and I wish I could stop feeling scared when Aragorn (AKA
Strider) walks the Paths of the Dead with Legolas and Gimli. Having secured the
trilogy and devoured it more than seven times in the course of the next five
years, I must now take you with me to a bookstore in Salt Lake where I found Unfinished
Tales and The Silmarillion. It was Tolkien time again!
But here, my search hit an obstacle and many moons passed
and while I watched all the movies when they came out, humming and hawing about
if the Witch King of Angmar was scary enough or if Treebeard was endearing
enough, my collection of JRRT’s works seemed to have hit a wall.
And then…my father went to America and came back with The
Hobbit…and the fever hit me another time, for one does not simply read The
Hobbit without once revisiting the trilogy does one?
However, my quest was not yet over because one book
remained- The Children of Hurin.
For what seemed like an eternity, I searched for that book.
I went to College Street- they said it was out of print. I had not discovered
Bookline (a quaint bookstore in the myriad bylanes of Kolkata) back then, and I
thought my collection would be doomed to remain incomplete.
So, imagine my joy when my father took me to Golpark to see
someone last year and because I was bored, I wandered into a small footpath
bookstore and there it was!
The Children of Hurin, second-hand, 155 rupees.
Hardcover.
A journey that begun as a seed in the mind of a 9-year-old
boy, saw its end almost sixteen years later. I now have all the books.
Sometimes I look at them and I feel gratitude to them, because without JRRT,
there would be no room in my brain for Christopher Paolini, Anne McCaffrey,
Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett.
I feel like I myself have gone through the length and
breadth of Middle-Earth to find them all, and in the darkness bind them.
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