I don’t remember the precise words, but the line noted that insects were the embodiment of our deepest human fears: the insides on the out, all spikes and gesturing, and the power of a determined collective. I recall noting – even as I speed-read the passages and questions on my ACT in Literature – the particular sentence that described our human fear of insects. This habit of being able to recognize the unique voice of writers I had no idea I would ever meet in person was one I could not shake. I kept the back page of a notebook for gems like the one above, from Vikram Seth, which I wrote out in elaborate longhand. We dreamed of caravans, midnight feasts, puddings, and snow, things we had never experienced in our own lives “Hooloovoo, a hyper-intelligent shade of the color blue”, I took from Douglas Adams, as a child. What I couldn’t memorize in its entirety, I wrote down in notebooks. That could be done without servility, or becoming emotionally indentured to ones siblings.
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And so we had to also turn into book thieves, risking fisticuffs in order to get at the final pages of the others’ book.īut writing. “The book you borrowed has only 253 pages”, one of us might say, “so you can only read 253 pages of the book I borrowed”. The brother closest in age to me and I often exacted payment in pages of a book. They were traded for favors of all kinds.
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They were brought out and read with deep pleasure. Books were passed around and packed away quickly into school bags as though they might be confiscated. We begged for books from our friends at school, from neighbors our own age and much older. Reading was desired, of course, but books were hard to come by, and that meant several things: my two older brothers and I read with great appetite, we fought over books, we memorized what we saw in black and white, and we dreamed of caravans, midnight feasts, puddings, and snow, things we had never experienced in our own lives. W hen I was a child, there was nothing much to do in my house in Colombo but write.