The “Ace” Student
There are two girls sitting beside me in my M. Phil class today. We introduce each other. As soon as I say my name, the questions follow, “You’re the topper, aren’t you?” and “How do you read?” I wish I could give them a formula, or just demonstrate it. But alas, I am done with formulas, so I limit myself to a smile.
When you are a teacher’s child, you realize it from early on that the only way to your parents’ heart is through studies. So reading for me has always been a matter of love: lost, as well as, gained.
Up to my sixth grade, I was not an “ace” student. I was an average one; 5th, 7th and around that number, which to my parents was always something to frown upon. I remember once I had gone to Ilam to visit my cousins after my finals were over for the 4th grade. So the day the results were out, my father called and informed that I had come out 8th in my class. My uncle, who was sitting nearby, commented after the phone call, “It must be 12th you know, parents often exaggerate their children’s achievements”. It was only later when I returned to Kathmandu and got to look at the mark sheet that I came to know that I had actually been 5th in the class. So that’s what my parents were like. No grade was a good grade and especially in the context where my teachers were my father’s students. So during those early years, my brother and I were sandwiched between our parents’ expectations versus our teachers’ inability to impress our parents with some magical report cards.
Things started changing a bit when we moved to Kirtipur. My brother was sent to a hostel and I had to join a new school. Lack of friends, as well as the absence of my brother, frequently made me tag along with my mother to her office during school vacations. My mother’s office being the library at the Central Department of Education, TU, there I found that books didn’t just mean what was prescribed during the school curriculum. There were Atlases and encyclopedias with pictures on them, there were fairy tales and artworks and architectures from different parts of the world, cookbooks and knitting manuals. Those bookshelves changed the way I looked at books. And thus began my affection towards dusty old books and their enticing smell. The chairs between those shelves became my second home. And for the first time in my life, I began reading not for the sake of my parents or my teachers but for myself.
When my brother returned home a year later, he no longer found a sister who shared his aversion to studies, but one who sneaked to a corner with a book in her hand. And hence what until then had been a bond between us, because of our mutual rebelling against being forced to study, converted into a distance that even today I have not been able to bridge.
Slowly, from aversion to fondness to love, reading became a passion to me. Not to learn or secure good marks, but for the simple joy of feeling those words, those carefully knitted sentences. I started living in two worlds, a corner of my room and the vast expanse between the pages. And till this day, that journey back to the real world feels disorienting.
How do I explain all this to my friends? How do I say that sometimes I wake up reading until 3 in the morning, gripped with fear that I might lose my eyesight if I continue this way? And yet, as soon as I close a book, I long for something new to bury myself into. That this passion is now developing into an addiction I cannot control.
How do I explain it to my friends that being a good student is like a protest, a tribute to the little girl who cracked the formula for her parents’ love at so tender an age. But reading, reading for her is not a means to an end but a pleasure in itself. She doesn’t read to extract its essence, but to enjoy its sweetness every time she takes a bite. That whatever she writes during exams is whatever sticks on her fingers, mouth, cheeks. That she identifies herself as the universal reader for whom the books are written. That reading makes her heart smile. That no matter how terrible the subject matter, a good book makes her feel alive. Have you read A Little Life? If not, I cannot explain.
Reading, I come across words, phrases that come as answers to questions I was yet to form, giving me a sense that this is what I should be doing at this exact moment in time. That there were so many moments like these in my M. A. class that here I am again in M. Phil., sometimes feeling like a little girl who has had a taste of an exotic fruit and has come for more and sometimes feeling like an old man who sneaks into his son’s room whenever he’s not around, wears his clothes and roams the city.
I wish I could tell them that it doesn’t matter. The books you read or the marks you secure are only one tiny aspect of your life. You are the whole universe breathed into a being and that is what matters the most. Everything else is but some dust you collect on your way, if you shake yourself well, it will all fall away.
