Home

When you shift houses, cities, schools a few times, you come to realize that home is not really a place. You get attached to a place because you attach memories to a place and you get attached to the memories - probably why most of us consider our childhood home special, something of a sanctum.

I love the place I grew up in, but it is a book, not a place, that is the repository of my childhood. Like with people, you can fall in love more than once but you will only ever have one first love.

My first true love was Johanna Spyri's Heidi. I was six or seven when I read it first; I loved it so much that I engraved my name on the front page in childish cursive, declaring that 'this book belongs to Mahathi (7 yrs 8 yrs age). I've read it so many times since that I'm not sure I can distinguish the first experience from the rest. Reading is so integral a part of my life that my immersion in Heidi feels like the dawning of consciousness.

I was drawn inexorably to Spyri's Switzerland, to her goat's cheese, rustling fir trees and fiery sunsets. It sounded like heaven on earth - perhaps it was hers, and the vision she conjured was so captivating that I fell in love with a place I'd never been to; an experience I would only have again with L.M. Montgomery's Prince Edward Island.

In this veritable heaven, Spyri creates one of the most beautiful portraits of childhood and one of the most moving evocations of innocence I've ever read. It's very easy to empathize with Heidi, and it seems apt somehow that this book that feels like home captures so perfectly the feeling of acute homesickness.

I first felt the pangs of homesickness when I failed to be absorbed by Heidi - for the first time. A lot of people have a favourite toy or a favourite blanket: I had Heidi. I read it whenever I was bored, sad, angry, happy - all the time, really. Sometimes three or four times a year. Heidi was my pal. Her comforting presence looms large throughout my childhood.

I was one of those kids who was always sure of her footing. I knew who I was, I knew what I liked, and I very emphatically knew what was right and what was wrong. Teenage put an end to certainty and opened up a world of grey. I've written about it before; in my first post for this blog, in fact.

For a year or two, I didn't read Heidi. Then suddenly, one day, it all felt like too much, and I wanted my old friend. I was fourteen. So I opened my trusty brown hardcover and began to read; only, this time, it didn't do the trick. I couldn't escape. I couldn't hear the magical sound of the wind rushing through the fir trees, couldn't feel Heidi's wonder when the sun set fire to the mountains; suddenly it was horribly clear to me that I was simply looking at ink blots on a page.

That is a moment I will never forget. For me, the death knells of childhood began to ring right then. From that day to this, I haven't read Heidi completely again. That didn't stop me from carrying her with me to the US when I went to college, and it didn't stop me from feeling as if I'd lost a very dear friend or maybe even an appendage when the airline lost my baggage the beginning of sophomore year; but it was a paradise to which I'd lost the key.

There were many, many days when I woke up and wished I could just be a child again. That I could see again with unclouded eyes and undimmed hope the many horizons I'd sketched, over and over again. I longed to enter that oldest and dearest landscape once more, but I was horribly afraid I would see those inkblots again.

In February, I tracked down the same edition I'd had on Amazon and ordered it for an extravagant sum. You see, it had to be the very exact same copy.

When it came, I looked at it in wonder. It was the same, but they had added colour plates to the book. So it had my beloved illustrations, and the same translation, as well as colour paintings by the illustrator.

I thought this time I was ready. I thought when it came that for a few hours it would be just me and Heidi, that we'd find our old rhythm again.

But somehow it was enough to just look and hold, to caress the spine and run my fingers over those beautiful, vivid, full-colour illustrations. I found, when I turned to the first page, that the words were as familiar to me as my reflection. They had become a part of me.

Those halcyon days

My uncle, my brother and I on a trip around California in May 2007

I have a chronic Peter Pan syndrome. I cling to childhood - to Disney, 8 o' clock bedtimes and my beloved children's classics. It hurts when I don't enjoy something I liked as a child - as if I've suffered an irrevocable loss - as if I've lost a piece of that childhood I'm trying so hard to hold on to. I have a slight, irrational terror of the adult world. When I'm confused by life, childhood seems to me a golden dream - and adulthood a cold, somewhat dreary reality. A significant part of my struggle as a teenager was, I think, my developing adult intelligence fighting against the child I steadfastly refused to let go of. It was so much more comfortable to think in black and white, and of right and wrong as two firmly demarcated, unshakeable categories. To believe blindly and faithfully that everything the 'elders' told you was unquestionably right. To believe in a world full of sunshine, where the good thrive and the evil are swiftly punished, is the privilege of a child with a happy, wholesome, slightly closeted upbringing. Amidst an age group where everyone seemed to be in a tearing hurry to grow up, I was the exception. I had no desire to watch R-rated movies; I still listened to Disney songs. Reading dark, depressing, layered literature as an eleventh grader made me wish I could analyze Heidi instead. I preferred Tom and Jerry to anything 'bawdy'.

The reason I found it so hard to let go - why I still sometimes feel a yearning that's almost physically painful for a time when everything seemed far simpler - is that I had a perfect childhood. I was gloriously happy. I was smart and bright, cheerful and imaginative, and everybody loved me. I devoured book after book, and my parents encouraged me, buying me whichever book I wanted - after checking that it was age-appropriate. I was a huge dreamer - I day-dreamed on the school bus home, sitting on the steps in front of my house, before going to sleep, while in the lift - everywhere. Huge, grandiose, colourful dreams that involved me saving the world, or conquering it as an artist, a singer, a writer, a scientist - whatever caught my fancy that particular day. They generally ended with me giving marvelously eloquent speeches that everyone cheered on. I also had dialogues with famous people, fictional people, literary characters, even dead authors. I befriended Anne and wrote letters to Jawaharlal Nehru (after reading some of Glimpses of World History). I was, you see, capable of anything. There was no doubt that I would change the world, after winning laurel after laurel. It was only a matter of deciding exactly what I wanted to do.

My life was exciting, because I recast every little incident in dramatic hues in my head. I was convinced that everything that happened to me taught me indispensable lessons and shaped my life in ways that biographers would comment on when I was famous. As you can see, I had a slightly swollen head.

It wasn't just my head, though. I lived in an apartment with large open spaces, and I had many friends. As a kid I played outside for hours. We had innumerable games that always ended with the 'denner' (I'm not certain how we arrived at that word. I guess it could be taken to be equivalent to the person who's 'it' in a game of tag) chasing everyone else. We played 'make-believe' and pretended that the route from the basement into someone's balcony was a 'secret passage'. We created dozens of clubs. With one went we went so far as to elect a leader (we passed around pieces of paper with all the members' names in them, and everyone had to tick who they wanted) and make medals and trophies to be awarded to the winners of subsequent games. Unfortunately, we abandoned the whole enterprise soon after. I fear the oldest members of the group got a little too old.

My brother and I were the closest of friends. As really little kids, we would wander around hand in hand. I got terribly offended when a friend suggested I go to her house to play without him, because he always broke her crayons. "How would you feel if I asked you not to bring your brother?" (She didn't have a brother so this argument really had very little impact on her). The curly-haired little brat was the apple of my eye. I told him the stories from all the books I read, and he listened open-mouthed. He would fall asleep with his hand curled around my finger. When he got to be what he considered too old to do this, I felt bereft; I would sneak my finger into his warm hand after he had fallen asleep, and watch in satisfaction as it curled around my finger. He would tell me about the animals and people and machines he had seen on National Geographic and Discovery; I would listen, my mind unfairly wandering off to whatever book I was presently reading. I read aloud to him from Hilltop Hospital (anyone else adore these?). Our favourite story was the one about Ruby the Vampire bat, where the twin ambulance drivers Ted and Ted, have very funny back-and-forth dialogues. We memorized Mulan word for word. We played, fought and talked on long drives to holiday destinations. I felt genuinely sorry for people without siblings.

I had everything. The world was my oyster. Was it any wonder I fought aggressively the necessity of waking up?