Ammu reads

On my tenth birthday, I'd demanded—in peak Dudley fashion—that I wanted a hundred books. The first brick to build that gigantic dream library. I'd finally mastered the juktobornos and was feeling more grown up now that I'd leveled up my LadyBird colours and the teacher had given me a Peter and Jane with smaller fonts. 

My father obliged, but my mother had one condition: As long as 50 of them were Bangla books, they'd take me to the bookstore. I was ecstatic. My parents, my sister, and I went down to the old Sobhanbag mosque and visited one of the little stores that neighboured the legendary Gyankosh. I was allowed free rein to explore the stacks of books on the floor and on the shelves. A man answered my father's queries from a hole in the ceiling, and dropped fat, dense, picture-less books I ignored. The books my father read had monochrome covers, no pictures, or just the head of a politician on the cover, and for as long as I can remember, he asked me to borrow "educational books" from the school library instead of Babysitters' Club. Naturally, I never took his advice when it came to reading. 

I had stacked up a tower of books—almost all of them the thin translations of children's books from the West, and certain Bangla ones that had vanished to obscurity (though I still have a copy of Etu'r Dinosaur from this haul)—Ammu looked through the stack and suggested I buy some comics instead, pointing to the section of Diamond Comics, and specifically Pinky comics from the Chacha Choudhury universe. She insisted I would finish reading my picks within a few days. Boy, was she right. I think that was the first time I regretted not listening to my mother (this is a recurring event now). All the guests at the birthday party—my beloved extended family, who were given a preemptive booklist in case my parents refused—did their due diligence. Now I had maybe two copies of Heidi, and god knows how many Snow Whites. As Ammu predicted, I had read everything by the following weekend. My to-read list did not last the winter vacation, as I'd hoped. So, I'd begun to take my mother's book suggestions, maybe not always out of my own volition, but I rarely regretted it. She'd eased me into Shukumar Ray and Sheba Prokashoni by the time I was 12. I remember once my cousins and I passed around a copy of Noboni - Ekta Prem-er Golpo in secret and especially hidden away from my chhoto fupi, who scared us all. It disappeared a few days after I had started it; when I couldn't find it anywhere, my mother suggested Ogniroth by Samaresh Majumdar—thus, began my long love affair with Jolpaiguri. I remember going into my mother's room at intervals to ask for word meanings and just couldn't understand why this girl would be sent to the corner room once a month for six days, which launched us into the conversation on how periods are seen as unholy. I'm grateful that my mother never let me feel unholy during those days. 

Noboni reappeared in the living room bookshelf the same time as she introduced me to Deepaboli from Satkahon, so I was significantly distracted. Of course, when I read Noboni later on, I understood why it was removed, and frankly, it was a semi-boring read as a young-adult. 

Ammu took real charge of my reading habits when my father got us a family library card from the British Council. I was inhaling YA novels as if they were cigarettes, failing math, and forgetting to do my homework on the regular, and of course acing English classes and reading groups. I would wait for Saturdays, when Abbu would drop us off at Fuller Road on his way to whatever meetings he had. Soon, Ammu and Abbu started to take me to the blue bus full of books every Tuesday. It stood in front of Nur Masjid in Mohammadpur for two or three hours. Those books were always dog-eared, with certain pages missing or numerous scribbles in the margins in an array of handwritings. When I heard that Bishwa Shahitto Kendra suspended their mobile libraries, I thought of those afternoons in that stuffy bus and the one time with my mother passing me a battered copy of Sundarbane Saat Batsar, which I lost on a boat trip and never paid the fine for.   

Throughout my school years, Ammu would assign a different writer for me to read during each vacation. The goal was to finish all the books by that author in the house, and it was always someone who wrote in Bangla. So I went through one summer vacation reading Noukadubi and a few short stories by Tagore in Chittagong, at my youngest aunt's house as she fed me aam-dudh-bhaat. During another winter vacation in our village home, I finished the entirety of Shera Satyajit and Aaro Satyajit. She objected to my exploration of certain writers, famously Humayun Ahmed since he dwelled too much on a woman's blouse button and pretty much snatched away Taslima Nasrin's Ko when she found me with it; she didn't explain why, but always offered a satisfactory alternative. It must be noted that she never threw any books away, just told me to read them when I was older. I was a good girl, so I obliged. 

My mother reads way less than she used to, now that we're grown up. Her back hurts, her eyes aren't as powerful, and she has too many worldly worries to deal with. I remember when she used to forget to feed us because she'd reached a specific part of the book and didn't want to get up. She'd lie there with a pillow under her chest, and a book propped up in front of her, glasses lowered to the tip of her sharp nose and head tilted slightly upwards to accommodate the bifocals for hours. My little sister would be ordered to walk on her back before bedtime. 

Life comes full circle; she's the one who gets scolded for scrolling her phone till 2 am now, and I'm the one asking everyone to limit their screen time and secretly unfollowing problematic Facebook pages from her phone the same way she hid away those books. I sanitise her newsfeed now, the way she sanitised my introduction to literature. She doesn't like that I police her online habits, but I call it literary karma.

Nawar Fairooz is a teacher and aspiring writer.