My love, My life !!

People reading this blog will be thinking that I am going to write something about my better half !! Even though, my world revolves around him, my vocabulary and language is not that strong yet, through which I can do justice to my feelings towards him. Hence it is better that I start writing about my first love. Before that let me make it clear that my first love is not any person.

I was a kid when I fell in love for the first time, in 3rd standard. And in retrospection, I know that it was nothing less than love, though at that time I did not have any idea that a strong feeling has started to possess me.

My parents used to force me to develop a good reading habit. They even used to read stories from books when I was very small and gifted me with 3/4 books during my birthdays. But somehow I never showed any interest towards them.

Suddenly in 3rd std, during our library class (then we used to have compulsory library classes twice a week), I was given the book entitled "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain (an abridged version of course, with pictures on one side and texts written in a very simple language on the other). In the beginning I forced myself to go through it as we were supposed to write a summary in our library scrapbook. But after 2 days of reading, I found myself eagerly waiting for those 2 days of the week which had the lib classes (as we were not allowed to carry lib books home then).

At home, I started searching desperately among the old stacks of magazines and books. I found "Arabian Nights", "The Little Matchgirl", "Snow white and the seven dwarfs", et al. While turning those thick pages, I was utterly fascinated by the fictitious world. My parents wondered about the drastic change in me. And after that there was no looking back. I slept, ate, walked reading the novels or daydreaming about the characters. I completed Feluda, Kakababu, Ha-ja-ba-ra-la, Pagla Dashu in no time at all.......

From 5th std onwards I started Enid Blyton (though it did not appeal to me as such). Hence I went back to the classics. I remember I cried a lot after reading the "Little Women" by L.M. Alcott. As I grew Nancy Drew, The prince and the pauper, Around the world in 80 days, came to my life. Whenever new academic year in school started I finished all the stories in the English texts within the first week.

I remember I used to imagine myself as one of the characters of the stories, mostly the protagonist. While reading Pather Panchali, I used to be durga. I also dreamed about the royal mansions of the Raj Kahini. I got so much involved in these stories, that I became oblivious to the world around me.

One day I got caught reading "To sir, with love" during the 11th std. Actually I was reading the novel during my study hours. My father came and stood behind me and I didn't even realized. As expected, he scolded me very bitterly, took all the novels away from me and repented the fact that he had inculcated the reading habit some 8 years back. But somehow I did not even hear properly what he had said.....I was obsessed with my love then. I became more stubborn. During nights, after my parents slept, I sneaked out from my room and grabbed a novel, covered it with brown paper and labeled it "A textbook of Physics" (or something similar to that). I was careful enough to steal one novel at a time so that my parents couldn't get any idea about my midnight endeavors. I was blinded by love and desire. In this fashion, I read the novels by great authors like "Anna Karenina" by Tolstoy, The God of small things, The Namesake, The Interpreter of Maladies, Rebecca, The Mill on the Floss and ofcourse The Harry Potter series.

Actually the novels and books mean the world to me. They teaches me about life more than my parents, teachers or friends do. They make me smile when I am sad, they make me cry, they comfort me saying "at the end, everyone has the capability to face any type of mishap" when I get depressed about something. I learn the true meanings of love and friendship, to fight against the odds in life. I also understood the fact that one can never undo one's mistakes even after a lot of repenting !! And hence, they have become an integral part of me. Till the end of my life, I wont dare to break this bond which has been made some 14 years back. So here is the quote which truly signifies how I feel about my first love....
"Never failing friends are they, with whom i converse everyday"