Why I Read...

  “It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. . . . Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why."

~Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings 

Those of you who know me even slightly will know that I adore stories. I spend fifteen minutes or more on Instagram checking the stories and comics that the creators I follow have concocted up and most of my feed is filled with their talent. 

But the title of this is "Why I Read..." and to be honest I do not know the answer. I just know that if stories were to be taken away from me I would be devastated. Stories have gotten me through so much. I was five years old when my mother gave me a book to read and in the womb when my mother told me of the things we would do together. She taught me that the world is both beautiful and dark, and also that life is not about the Lamborghini in the drive way but the child begging for alms at a street corner, who hasn't eaten for a while and maybe a small packet of biscuits means more to him than any money his family will steal from him and use up in drinking themselves silly.

Stories are all around us. That's why I've been keeping a diary for a while now. From the moment you open your eyes, a story starts. How you spent your day is a story, the security guard in your complex whose WhatsApp you configured is a story. 

Grandparents told the best stories if you ask me. Their world was so different from ours. They didn't have access to books as freely as we did. They were a living, breathing treasure trove of experiences from the past; our first history teachers in a sense. I wonder why we are taught so sparingly about history. In reading William Dalrymple's City of Djinns I fell in love with Delhi all over again. My endeavour to learn Bengali is to read stories in my mother tongue, a practice I feel I should have started a long time ago.

Storytellers such as Neil Gaiman wax eloquent on the importance of libraries and the experience gathered from children's literature while storytellers like Charles Dickens (although in my opinion his characters are unrelatable) tell us long stories about good vs evil and how good prevails. John LeCarre will take us into the world of espionage. Alistair MacLean will enthrall us with thrillers. 

Edmond Dantes and his quest for revenge, Dustfinger and his desire to return home, Markus Zusak showing us a war torn landscape and Exupery telling us how important our child self is. All stories, all about the world we live in and all capable of teaching and giving us armor to use.

A story teaches you how to be good and also how to be evil. It gets under your skin (if you let it) and it shows you the world of words and their power from the perspective of someone else, someone who like me was perhaps born in the arms of imaginary friends.

I still cannot resist walking up to a person reading a book and asking, "Hey, what are you reading?"

Stories have been there for me longer than people have. My teachers told me I read to survive and my parents gave me the responsibility of taking care of our library. My friends say it is a bibliophile's paradise. I just think of it as a house full of stories.

And yet, some stories haunt me. Some stories break me and leave me a bleeding mess on the floor. Some stories give me the power to get out of a sticky situation.

I read because I do not know what or who I'd be if I did not.

The Bilge Master