Where are bookworms born?
In raddi shops, of course!
I can never pass by a raddi (scrap paper) shop without wondering what treasures lie within.
It all began when, as a girl of 7 or 8, I accompanied my mother to the used paper mart across the street to sell a pile of old newspapers. A stack of books in the corner caught my attention — and I was allowed to select a couple, since the prices were rock-bottom.
Of course, it started with the Champaks, Chandamamas and Tinkles (and the voracious reader that I was, I would never pass these up, even when well into my early tweens). But I soon discovered meatier, more engrossing fare.
Like the time I came across a bright green hardcover edition of Through the Looking Glass, its pages almost coming away from the binding. I can still picture the beautifully illustrated adventures of Alice as she stumbled from one deliciously improbable situation to the next, and to this day, I can recite the first few stanzas of ‘The Jabberwocky’ off the top of my head.
Or the book that introduced me to the miniature world of The Borrowers, filled with looming dangers, and the meticulous planning and execution that went into each heroic escape.
The best thing about these exciting little trips to the raddi shop, was that I often ended up reading books that I might never have picked from a library or bookshop, given the wider variety available in those places. A case in point was Biggles, the cool and fearless RAF pilot — this was one series I wouldn’t ever have picked from a library myself. It was the lack of choices in the raddi shop that pushed me to try whatever books I could lay my hands on.
Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, the delectable crimes conjured up by Agatha Christie in cozy English villages — I worked my way through most of the standard fare of young Indian kids of that era at a decent pace. But it was the unlikely choices that made the most impact: an innocuous-sounding book I picked up about a group of boys on a desert island turned out to be Lord of the Flies — a lesson in the power of mobs, and a glimpse of the beast that lies hidden within the most innocent of us.
Come to think of it, Providence seems to have kept sending me the right books at almost exactly the right junctures in my life, c/o those raddi shops. For example, A Tree grows in Brooklyn was a perfect coming-of-age book for a young city-bred girl like me.
I wonder if the raddi shops of today are as rich in the variety and quality (content-wise) of books, that I seemed to have stumbled upon, all those years ago…
So, what gems did you discover in the raddi shops of your childhood?
