I am fortunate.  I had opportunities.  I became a reader for life.

Hamlet equivocated, “Words, words, words…”.  Words fascinated me.   All around me, there were details.  I needed words to express them and to store them in memory.  Curiosity overcame me.  I needed words to express what I discovered.  Printed words opened a repository of words.  Here I found my treasure.

My childhood till the seventh year of my life was spent in a polyglot world.  We lived in Mangalore.   At home, we spoke Malayalam.  To my dismay, when I started schools at five years of age, the medium of instruction was Karnataka.   I was not aware that I would be immersed in an unknown language.  In the Catholic church, the payers and sermon were in Konkini. My older sisters often spoke in English which they learned in higher grades. My Mother spoke to the domestic help in Thulu.   Words surrounded me.

My family moved to Kandassankadavu, my parents’ hometown.  Everyone spoke Malayalam.  Students started English in fifth grade and Hindi in sixth grade.  Kandassankadavu is a rural community situated ten miles west of Thrissur, the closest city.

I grew up listening to stories.  I had four older sisters. Annie and Baby were avid readers.  There were five sisters and one brother.  When the young ones were sick, the older sisters were responsible for entertaining them. Most of the time, it was by telling stories.  Annie and Baby took over this job.  They were both great storytellers.  I was exposed to fairy tales, Arabian Nights tales,  Pancha Tanthra fables, Aesop’s Fables, Bible stories and many others.   Cinderella, Snow White and Seven Dwarfs, Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Bears, Hansel and Gretel,  Shaharazad, Ali Baba, Sinbad, Aladdin and others became alive.  They also read stories to us.  They showed us comics and explained the dialogues.   Thus I came to know Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, Flash Gordon, Br’er Rabbit , Curly Vee, and so many others who came into my world.   I became impatient about waiting for someone to read stories and tell stories.  It became imperative that I read.  The change in medium of instruction did not deter me.   

Unlike the other households in our village, my home had various reading materials.  There were English and Malayalam dailies, Reader’s Digest, Mathrubhumi weekly, and Catholic publications such as Mary Vijayam Sathya Deepam, Amma, and Catholic Digest.  Astonishingly, the village had a Reading Club.  It subscribed to several periodicals and magazines in both English and Malayalam.   The Hindu, The Mail, and The Indian Express were the regular dailies in our house along with Mathrubhumi, Deepika and Malayala Manorama.This was wealth indeed.  Many American and Indian publications entered this Club’s collection.  It had hired a courier to take four publications to the houses of the members on Mondays and Thursdays.  Thus, a family could read eight periodicals every week.  It was a real hustle to get your hands on one when there were more than one reader.  Publications such as Life, Today, Span, Illustrated Weekly of India, Kala Koumudi, Jana Yugam, Shankar’s Weekly, etc. became familiar friends.  Only later I realized that not many of my contemporaries had this privilege.

Mathrubhumi weekly was a veritable source of all levels of Malayalam writings and translations of classics from other Indian languages and foreign languages. In my younger days,  I read “Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, “Treasure Island”, “Horrors of Dracula”, “Sherlock Holmes” stories, etc. In Malayalam.  

In sixth grade, I read my first English book, “Adventures of Robin Hood”.  After that, there was no stopping me.  Jane Austen, Dickens , Mark Twain and others became very familiar. I asked my sister’s advice about what books to read.  There was a copy of Jane Austin’s “Emma” in the house.  I read it in eighth grade.  It was a struggle.  But I wanted to leave a mark on my reading life.  I found many books left over by older family members.  

I was lucky that my school was my neighbor.  The Sisters of the Carmelite Congregation ran the school.  They were very friendly.  The Headmistress, Sr. Corsina, encouraged my reading and used to lend me the new book arrivals.

The Kerala syllabus of those days included many English, Malayalam and Hindi classics in prose and poetry whether in school or college.  In the younger grades, the English books were abridged to make it easier for younger readers.  So the language retained the purity unlike the simplified versions.  Thus I was in the company of Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Keats, Swift, Shelley, Coleridge, Stevenson, Mark Twain and Milton to name a few. College curricula in those days emphasized Humanities.

College opened the door wider.  Even though I majored in Mathematics, my college did not offer much in graduate studies.  I elected English Literature and my reading widened.  Studying became a hobby. Later, my marriage took me to the USA.  I managed another post graduate degree in English.  The public libraries in the USA are its best feature. I thrived I in reading.

My life can be put in a nutshell as the product of reading.