I must say that I am to be born in a writer’s family. My childhood was spent in playing and idle pastimes, because I was never a studious boy or a story fan. I often wondered at my cousin brother who swallowed book after book from His passion was indeed remarkable. my uncle’s library.
Our house used to have a regular inflow of books, but they passed me by. But as a handwriting exercise, when I was of six or seven years, my mother recited lines from Tagore’s Katha O Kahini. It is a collection of narrative poems in light verse. Later on I read Bankim Chandra’s Kamala Kanter Daftar. Although its deeper meaning passed over my head, I liked the author’s story-telling and specially the mewing noise of the cat. In English we were prescribed Aesop’s Fables. In this, the behaviour of the animals, their dialogues and the fun and humour made their special appeal to my senses.
At this stage, now that I am twenty plus, I cannot account fully how gradually such readings influences me. But by now I am a full-fledged lover of books. Although put in science, I never fight shy of reading literature. I clearly recall today snaps (short portions) of those verses and scraps or fragments of those stories of childhood.
Books began to attract me, specially of crime and detection. Stories of Sherlock Holmes brought out in illustrated editions enamoured me (made me a favourite of) of the detective. For long I suffered under a notion that they were the writer’s self-portrait until I discovered at maturity the actual writer. Apart from these Lamb’s tales from Shakespeare’s stories rendered in easy English absorbed me for days. lucid
How the change in my being has been caused I am too young now to enumerate. But I feel it tangibly today when I see the difference with my other playmates of childhood. I love them still, but I dislike their mendacity (= habit of telling lies), filthy language in quarrels.
The great masters of language and literature both in English and in my mother tongue framed their stories and poems. Their shrewd and intelligent appeal to our taste and morality through absorbing stories and tricky enchanting verses, perhaps, caused the miracle.
Childhood is the most malleable or impressionable age in a man’s life. The pictures of Rakhal, a spoilt child, and Gopal, an obedient one, drawn so faithfully by Vidyasagar were my first lessons. As direct moral sermons of what is good and what is bad the preachings might never have worked. But told interestingly the boys had made their mark in my infant soul.
Literature is a source-spring of joy. If affects our senses, our mind and spirit by giving them a strange kind of pleasure. It improves our crude taste and feelings. I have learnt through it the blessings of love and the curses of hate; the refinements of feelings and the waste that runs riot (= becomes wild) in violence and revenge.
