Memories (2)

I have this theory that children who grow up reading a lot of books, especially sanitized fiction like Enid Blyton (where all characters worth emulating are virtuous without being priggish, and on the whole perfectly adorable), turn out to be rude, defiant, obstinate and generally shorn of the innocence that is supposed to be the hallmark of childhood. Imagine learning from every story book you read that you aren’t worth much if you are not generous and truthful in your ways, and then going on to discover that in the real world not many people reach up to the lofty standards set by Blyton’s characters, and are by no means ashamed of this failing! The discrepancy between these two worlds – Blyton’s and yours – is quite enough to make you confused to the point of going insane. Here I shall not stoop to giving personal examples, but try and present a general picture of what might happen. Say, for instance, you grew up reading (and passionately believing) that promises are meant to be kept, that only a very mean and unhealthy species breaks promises. Then you come across someone very close to you casually breaking a promise (made, say, to you). What hurts and confuses most is not the fact that the person has broken a promise, but the fact that s/he should find nothing wrong in it. What you don’t understand is why that person isn’t trying to cook up an excuse or argue her/his point, why s/he should treat the breaking of a promise as the most natural thing in the world and feel not the least guilty or contrite or ashamed or, at the very least, even slightly uncomfortable. You know – from the little worldly experience you’ve had – that people cannot be as perfectly flawed as a model character in a book given a human touch. You know that perfection is unattainable because perfection consists in being perfectly aware of the imperfection you still bear. But what you cannot digest is the fact that people seem to treat the process of attaining perfection as unattainable in itself. You know that one cannot, with the best of intentions, always be truthful – so strong is the instinct of self-preservation – but you cannot reconcile yourself to the fact that one should be so supremely unaffected by your ideals, pretending, as if it were, that truthfulness by itself is not worth making such a song and dance about.

Like all the positive people created by Enid Blyton, you expect everyone close to you to be witty as a matter of course. But of course they aren’t. Which is only natural, since they have real lives to live; unlike Blyton characters they don’t have all day to hang about doing nothing except being witty for the sake of readers. But this I did not understand. It wasn’t that I expected good folks to be witty in general – more dangerously, I assumed that if you weren’t witty you weren’t good enough in the first place. Imagine making your way in this mean and wicked world with such lofty standards in sight! No wonder I made a mess of things. Very few people made it to my list of tolerable creatures. Most fell woefully short. Strangely, this did not leave me feeling smug and well-pleased with myself; rather I was left discontented and distressed. I wanted to have witty people around me, and when I couldn’t, all my anger was aimed at those who actually dared to flaunt their witless existence in front of me. I felt a bitter hatred for them all. It was as if I couldn’t forgive them for letting me down. It was as if by being witless they had taken the joy out of my life and I couldn’t forgive them for that. Like the books I read so voraciously, it was all a lot of make-believe. I fancied I couldn’t ever be happy with the everyday characters around me. So most of the times I would transport myself to a world where the very characters who peopled my real world assumed qualities that I so cherished. When I had to return to reality I would do so with little grace. Funny child I was, living as I did a Walter Mitty-like double existence – only I remained the same, it was the people around me who changed. It’s not hard to imagine what a cross and contrary person I came across as.