A hugger, a kisser, a storybook reader

When we were little, Ma gave me and my brother something of great value, and of little cost. A love of books. She didn't buy us piles of them. She just sat there and read her own. So we got bored and did the same, and then we were never bored again.

My earliest memories of Ma involve half of her face poking out from behind a book. Quiet breathing, page turning, a scowl of concentration sitting above her nose. If she wasn't cooking, or letting me know what she thought of my messy room, she was reading her Hemingways and Durrells, her le Carrés. Or handing me her battered copy of The Old Man and the Sea - probably to stop me reading another Barbara Cartland; I was sixteen. 

I grew up thinking this is what mothers do: they read.

And they did, too. D's mother was no different. After I got married, I was suddenly surrounded by Bengali literature - of which she read everything from the modern to the classics. D remembers her always worrying when she approached the last pages of a book if she didn't have another at hand to start on. Even in the years before her death, when she had trouble walking, she would stubbornly trudge to the local library at least once every week.

Books were how people passed an afternoon, an evening, a lifetime. There were fewer distractions, fewer people flicking their touchscreens.

I started reading to Chotto-ma before she was born. I read The Tale of Peter Rabbit loudly to my tummy every night through my pregnancy. It seemed perfectly logical at the time. Thankfully, D didn't blink an eye, and by the time Chotto-ma was born, we both knew the story by heart. I read her poetry, I read her fiction - loud enough for her to kick inside me in response. A few days before Chotto-ma was born, I remember D walking in on me reading aloud Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 'Half of a Yellow Sun', shaking his head at my choice of book. Wasn't it a tad early for her, the ravages of a bloody civil-war?

She's five now, and she loves books as much as she loves pancakes. D and I had made a few decisions early on - that we wouldn't give her screens to play with. No iPads (we don't own one), no iPhones, no laptops and certainly no video games. Yes, they're tempting babysitters, especially when you're bringing up a child without any family to give you a break, without a nanny to give you a breather. I'm sure we were sorely tempted, but I'm glad we held out. We now have a girl who's utterly technologically challenged, but she has plenty of time to catch up with that. For now, she has a world inside her head bursting with stories, books to burrow into and leaves and twigs to bring home. That will do.

So, here's a note to my mother: Apart from being a hugger and a kisser, thank god you were a reader, Ma. Amongst a hundred other reasons, I love you for that. For having me grow up with the smell of your old yellow books. You couldn't have passed on a better gift.

Ma reading to Chotto-ma, summer of 2013.