I like to think that I am well placed to write a memoir. Not because I’ve led a particularly interesting or unique life, or can offer sage advice to people, but simply because I have so much of my interactions and encounters stored in some form: recorded in the leaves of a religiously-kept diary, or long, sprawling emails to friends, or impressed on my mind. I like to remember and keep a note of my days, in some form or the other, and now, thanks to things like Whatsapp, I can turn back the pages of chats and find trivial events, random observations made in the moment, basically the stuff of dreams for my to-be biographer and, of course, my no-doubt by-then faltering memory.
But some things don’t require me to turn back to archived conversations, or dusty journals (jk, my journals are totally well preserved and continue to be a source of much entertainment for me). One of those things is my first meeting with a certain boy who lived.
Would it shock you to learn that when I first heard about this Harry Potter person, I was less than enthused? I remember it so clearly. It was during the morning assembly in school, and I was in the sixth grade. A boy from the fifth grade had been called up to speak to us, for some reason. He’d read this new book that was becoming all the rage, over in the UK. It was about a boy who found out he was a wizard, and discovered, along with a tragic legacy, a wonderful world, full of magic and monsters. The boy’s name was Harry Potter, and the book he inhabited was named after him, and some Stone or the other. I wasn’t impressed enough to listen to the title.
Yep, that was how I met Harry. I was so underwhelmed by the mention of him that I totally ignored the title of book he came from. Not exactly the start of an epic romance.
But obviously fate had other plans. A while later, my mother mentioned to me that she’d been hearing about these ‘Harry Potter books,’ written by a woman in the UK. Apparently the children of her friends abroad were obsessed with them. I probably reacted in a typically pre-teen manner, ie, said ‘Whatever’ and gone back to my own life. She persisted though, and asked if I wanted to read them. ‘I’m too old to read about wizards,’ I said snottily. ‘I bet it’s like those Blyton books,’ I thought. For me, British books were stodgy, and old fashioned, and just so weird. I was all about American books you know, where kids didn’t do weird things like obsess over a meal called ‘tea’ and talk in slang that I didn’t understand. I guess this was my first brush with cultural exclusion or whatever, but I was too young to understand, or particularly care about it. Also, and I think this is particularly relevant now, there seemed to be more kids who looked like me, or at least were non-white, in American books. I hadn’t yet read a British book which was not about fairytale creatures in faraway woods, or all-white all-English schoolgirls in improbably located schools by the sea.
In my childish, xenophobic fashion, then, I rejected Harry Potter for a second time. But, as Ian Malcolm once said, life…finds a way.
Undeterred by my lukewarm reaction, my mother went and bought one of those Harry Potter books. (#NeverthelessShePersisted) It was Prisoner of Azkaban, picked up probably because it was the thickest, and I was in a phase of wanting to read ‘big’ books. She told me to just ‘try’ it. Though the blurb didn’t thrill me, I did notice there was a girl on the cover. So I thought, okay, maybe this won’t be all bad, and I opened the book.
And then I couldn’t stop reading.
I try not to use hyperbole when I write, but honestly, reading Prisoner of Azkaban was a transformative experience, something I’ve felt with only two other books—Lord of the Rings (which I wrote about here) and Samit Basu’s The Simoqin Prophecies. I finished Azkaban and was so blown away by the ending that I immediately flipped the book back to the beginning, and reread the whole thing. I pressed it on my mother and told her she ‘had’ to read this book, because wow the plotting and the finale and mygodeverything. She was less impressed than I was, but admitted that yes, it was ‘quite good’. I didn’t understand why she wasn’t hyperventilating, but ah well, to each their own.
The moral of this story is: kids shouldn’t always choose their own books, because they can be kind of stupid.
Sometimes I’m embarrassed when I think about it, how reluctant I was to let Harry into my life. At other times, I’ll reshape the narrative to look like this, like a grand romance that was simply destined to happen, that I didn’t force into being. Isn’t that really the dream, to just sort of stumble into a love that’s epic and overwhelming, and wonder why you didn’t see it all along? Harry Potter has been that big romance for me, the sort that propels movies and sagas, inspired a blog, a book, and probably more things in my life than I can count. I’ll always be grateful to Rowling for creating him and his world.
So here’s to many more years, Harry. May Hogwarts always be there to welcome us home.
Where the Dog Star rages 