Question: What was the first piece of fiction you read that had an impact on you?
Answer: I did not grow up with many books, especially children’s books. In second grade, a schoolmate lent me a copy of “The Arabian Nights”—we both thought it was a book for children—and told me I had three days to read it. Oh my, I had three wild days of reading, remembering so many vivid details without understanding any! It made me laugh so hard at the time; when I reread the book a few years ago, I laughed even harder.
The above is Yiyun Li’s answer, made on June 14, 2010, to The New Yorker’s short story collection “20 Under 40” and its Q. & A. session.
Born in 1972 in Beijing, Li’s answer indeed fits my own private juvenile literacy rate in India in the English language some 30 years before her birth, and her words largely portray my own primary-school access – none at all! – to reading materials in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Darjeeling.[break]
But there are differences, too: Li lived in the sprawling capital city of Beijing while I was a farm boy in a corner of Darjeeling. Also, while the relative backwardness of the post-Independence 1950s in India is understandable in retrospection, Li belonged to the more aware and exposed world of the 1970s, or so it seemed then, in the China of Mao and Chou.
However, as typical, though diverse as well, Asian children in the 20th century, we were generally deprived of personal reading materials early on. We had no children’s books to read, no fairy tales to listen to, no bedtime stories to lull us to sleep: The western tradition of having read “Snow White” or “Alice in Wonderland” by the time one reached pre-pubescence was as alien and irrational in Asia.
No kiddy reading stuffs in Asia
Leaving a North Asian writer like Yiyun Li right here, let me home in on myself as a northern South Asian writer writing in English. How Yiyun Li and her fellow Chinese writers – like Ha Jin, among many others – developed their own individual proficiency in China in the English language to become novelists and short story writers of international reputation is an altogether different matter, best left to themselves for unraveling. But when Li was born, I was already 29 years old and a Lecturer of English in Kathmandu, and what I had long done to hone my English had become just merry memories in my life by then. But then, it is the very topic: What I had to do and go through to reach the point where I had obtained my Masters in English Literature from Tribhuvan University in 1971. It is the story of my flashbacks which is the topic here.
Kids in South Asia
I started school when India gained its independence in 1947. I learnt English and Nepali alphabets and numbers at the Peshok Tea Estate School, located above the turquoise-and-muddy Tista-Rangit confluence between Darjeeling and Kalimpong. Then my primary education began at the Scottish Mission School above my family farmhouse in Nor Busti. Then my lower secondary schooling continued in the valley of Bijanbari, our rural areas’ block development center, a suburban bazaar. My final school was the Turnbull High in Darjeeling. Thus, I made the tour of four schools before my collegian life ended uninterruptedly at St Joseph’s College (North Point) in Darjeeling. Then a hiatus of two years followed in Kathmandu before obtaining my MA degree from Kirtipur in 1971.
The first three schools I went to can best be described, by borrowing Nobel Kishore Rai’s words, as “dhulautay iskul” – dusty schools. My school in Peshok Tea Garden was dusty, the mofussil school in Nor Busti was dustier, the Bijanbari one was suburban and so-so; and only Turnbull was the genuine “shahari” institution.
Many fellow Nepali writers – Nobel, Abhi Subedi, Ramesh Shrestha, CK Lal and other names come to my mind – have attended such rickety and ramshackle schools in their Pahad and Madhesh villages in Nepal, and what we all have become by now are for everyone concerned to see – for better, or worse.
But how did such fellow “vernacular” Nepalis – meaning those “Pakhe”-s who had no luck to be educated at such hallowed “Missy-Baba” Jesuit/Convent/Cambridge O/A-Level schools, colleges and such temples of higher learning in India and elsewhere in the world, as did the offspring of the other high-caste, highborn, aristocratic and feudal Nepali “Samanti” lineages and dynasties – achieve their proficiency in English must come from their own selves.
It is mine own story in this lot that I write here.
Learning English My way
My true educational English-language experiences began only in 1956 when I was 12 years old. It was when I was brought to the town of Darjeeling for my “further” education. I say “experiences” because my training in the English language and expression came in many forms, which I describe in the following passages.
Being transported to Darjeelingtown was mixed blessings. The sense of landlordism that came from owing a farm was reduced to ashes when I left the family farmland and landed in Darjeeling where practically everything cost money. Years of dire straits and deprivation followed, with hot cash often in short supply. This monetary poverty, in gist, led me to become a gardener’s apprentice early on and later leader of the first Nepali Rock ‘n’ Roll band in Darjeeling. These teenage economic activities put some cool cash in my pockets and helped me pursue my modern quests, including learning the usage and expressions in the English language in various ways.
Even then, you may ask, “But why such a high premium placed on English, pray?” Well, it was because English had the highest premium in our school curriculum during our times. Mathematics also carried the same premium. To get ahead in life, one’s English had to be pluperfect from the very foundation, and a high aggregate obtained in mathematics – arithmetic, algebra and geometry – was a most desirable double whammy.
But it was Sanskrit – the world’s greatest language of the Indo-Aryan Vedic Civilization which India/Bharat never tires boasting of – that made every high school pupil weep because it was not only the third biggest headache in our high school curriculum, it was also the most useless subject in one’s professional life and career and livelihood prospects in the future. There was no recourse but to rote Sanskrit shlokas to get through the exams with just enough pass marks. Passing in mathematics was possible by selective “specialization” of sums, theorems, problems and the like. As my group’s dunciest dunderhead in numbers and equations, it was the only way for me to negotiate the mathematical mazes.
In comparison, the other subjects – Nepali, economics, political science, history, geography, and elective papers such as optional mathematics and civic studies – were easier and passable with adequate preparation.
But since English demanded spontaneous buildup with no shortcut escapism, it merited my most concentrated attention, devotion and dedication. But how to go about this most ominous success-or-failure-in-life question was my biggest challenge. After all, English was an alien and a strange language and a colonial baggage, but it was also a dominant world language – and there lay the crux of the matter.
And the East wasn’t the West, as so many
imagined – and falsely
Belonging to a particular socioeconomic group, mine was not a generation reared on Enid Blyton, The Hardy Boys, or Nancy Drew, nor The Sleeping Beauty, or The Ugly Duckling, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, or those other luxurious and out-of-reach fantasized sour grapes. Therefore, when South Asian writers and thinkers like Salman Rushdie, VS Naipaul, Pico Iyer, Jhumpa Lahiri and other brilliant brainies ostentatiously cite having read Gogol, Ovid, Homer, Virgil, Aristophanes and all those classical masters already in their tender years, I spiral into wonderment and confusion: What solid childhoods these fortunate brats had had, my God!
So my education in English, on the contrary, began with reading comic books and cartoons – those fabulous picture frames in color and black and white, and with valiant exploits and valorous dialogues of the heroes and losers depicted in them. These regular editions came in pocket-size portability with 80 generous pages each, another format being tabloids in 40 large full-color leafs, and quite another being magazine-size gems in color, each with 60 pages.
Cowboys n’ Injuns, funny cartoon characters and real heroes
The pocket-size thrills came with western and cowboy icons: Buck Jones, Kit Carson, Kansas Kid, The Lone Ranger and Tonto, Wyatt Earp and other brave Sheriffs and Marshals in Dodge City, Billy the Kid, and other bank robbers. They rode galloping horses across the Death Valley, over Ponderosa and other wilds, chased and fought against Red Indians, had barroom brawls, fought duels and gunfights in which the fastest gunslingers drew their Colt45 six-shooters and downed ruffians, cattle rustlers and Mexican bandits. They were a hard-drinking, rough-riding and open-air prairie-living tough lot who led the Oregon Trail and steered cattle drives with their lariats. Davy Crockett, James Bowie, Wild Bill Hickock and Daniel Boone were the other Wild West frontier heroes, and the Wells Fargo Pony Express carried one all over the big-sky, open American landscapes.
This was how I learnt American English of the “gotta-gonna-gotcha-betcha-wanna” variety with “ain’t” and “dunno” and “whad d’ya mean?” thrown in for good measures.
These legendary heroes were later portrayed on Technicolor and Vista Vision Cinemascope screens by such Hollywood actors as Gary Cooper, Van Heflin, Anthony Quinn, Burt Lancaster, Jeff Chandler, James Stewart, Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Tab Hunter, Glen Ford, Charlton Heston, Alan Ladd, Kirk Douglas, and Jack Palance. Such famous Westerns – The Searchers, Rio Bravo, Gunfight at OK Corral, Shane, Last Train to Gun Hill, Three Ten to Yuma, The Fastest Gun Alive – were directed by John Ford, John Huston, William Wyler and other master filmmakers. The latter-day Cowboy heroes were Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn and others.
~~~~~
I still fondly remember two full-color British tabloid funnies called Dandy and Beano. One regular chap was called Desperate Dan – fat, uncouth, rough, dirty, and unshaven – and he was my favorite cartoon character in those days, for reasons now unknown to me today.
~~~~~
On the other hand, the Classics Illustrated Series, in full-color magazine format, were more serious, it being academic and intellectual in contents because it carried epic novels and literary masterpieces. Thus, I familiarized myself with Robin Hood, Rob Roy, and The Last of the Mohicans, Song of Hiawatha, Ivanhoe, Moby Dick, The Three Musketeers, Les Misérables, The Hunchback of Notre Dam, The Oxbow Incident, Treasure Island, Gulliver’s Travels, David Copperfield, Robinson Crusoe, and other immortal works.
The writer is the copy chief at The Week/Republica.
pjkarthak@gmail.com
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