WR_05_ myself as a reader series
by Haritha Chalil Savithri
I lived in a fisherman´s village when I was a child. My parents were teaching in the one and only government school in that narrow ribbon-like strip of land squeezed between the Arabian sea and a back water. I saw the first TV in my life when I was twelve years old. To reach the nearest town, we had to cross the back water in a tiny canoe, to catch a bus which normally came two or three times in a day.
My classmates always kept a respectful distance to me as I was the daughter of their teachers. I just wanted to be like them. They could play in the sticky, shiny black beach sand and came to school without sandals. When they were enjoying and sharing sumptuous meals with varieties of fish items, I had to go home to eat the boring lunch prepared by my mother in a hurry.
I spent my childhood in our big land which was full of trees, grass, grasshoppers, butterflies… and books! According to Francis Bacon, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” I lived with books, chewed and digested them.
We had a small library in our school. Next to the nearest Devi temple, there was another one. I was getting books from both and when my father would go to the next village twice a week to buy provisions, I accompanied him to get more books from the library there too. Yes! We had libraries and still we have, like you have bars in every nook and corner of the smallest villages in Spain.
We had to walk two kilometres through a narrow kutcha road, surrounded by paddy fields, which was full of different coloured water lilies, pearl spot fishes, lousy green frogs and huge snails. On the way back home, my father would carry big bags of vegetables and groceries, I would carry a small cloth bag with three books in it and dripping long-stemmed water lilies in my hands.
When I was in primary school, I liked translations. I was a fan of Bram Stocker and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. My mother was always complaining about my scary screams at night. She was afraid of the impacts that these kinds of books could cause on my tender brain. Nothing happened, as far as I can tell… I was absorbed in a soothing dreamlike world with the people, life and landscapes that I found in those beautifully translated books.
By that time, I fell in love with the books published from Moscow by publishers such as Raduga, Mir and Progress. Kerala is the first state in the world where a communist government came into power through democratic election. Naturally, the Soviet Union was interested in spreading communist ideals among the upcoming generation in such a place. It was a legendary process. They invited scholars from Kerala, taught them Russian language and translated books into Malayalam. These books were printed and published in Moscow and distributed in Kerala through Prabhath Book House.
We cannot consider it only as a propaganda. Their books included different genres from popular science to children’s literature to classics. Arkady Gaidar, Alexander Raskin, Yuri Olesha, Alexander Kuprin, Nikolai Dubov, Olga Perovstaya and Nikolai Nosov were only few among the favourites of Malayalees. Prabhath Book House had several mobile book vans to sell them in every nook and cranny of the state. Everybody could afford them as these books were the cheapest in the market. So, libraries collected them as much as they could.
Quality wise, these books were the best available in India. They were strongly bound and beautifully illustrated. Pages where off white in colour and had the most addictive smell I ever experienced. It was the smell of a faraway land and let us wander through vast Russian steppes, mountains filled with oaks and streams. They taught us not to fear the unknown, the value of team spirit, principles of honesty and ethics of integrity in the workplace.
The Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 and the flow of books from Moscow came to an end. We, the Russian heads in Kerala, felt abandoned. The Soviet Union played a great role in forming an international culture among our generation in Kerala. It helped a lonely girl, from a faraway village, to dream about snowy mountains and flocks of sheep when she looked at her white Indian clouds.
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