I read To Kill a Mockingbird when I was 10. My father worked in a public sector fertiliser company and we lived in the township — attending the company school, playing at the company club, praying at the company temple. There were never enough things to do, and there was never enough money to do them. It was during the summer holidays — two seemingly endless months of heat and humidity — that, bored out of my mind, I asked my father if I could read something from his library. Mockingbird was nearest to him. I read it all summer. And even though I had no idea of America’s race history and did not even wonder about things I didn’t understand, I loved the book. I thought of it as the adventures of Jem, Scout and Dill — the three children in the book.
The following summer, I read it again. I understood it a little better. I read it the year I turned 12 and then 13 and then, caught up as I was in a ritual of my own making, I read the book every summer until I left home at 17. Each year, I thought, the book grew bigger. I was certain I was Scout when I was 10. At 14, I fell in love, rather innocently, with Atticus. At 16, prissy, sheltered and judgemental, I berated myself for having “those thoughts” about a man with children, so what if he was widowed. It was only decades later, with the grudging acceptance that no one is as they seem, least of all your own self, that I realised that through all those readings the book had remained the same, but somehow I had changed. To Kill a Mockingbird was not merely a book, it was a marker of time, of lessons learned, of a life gradually being lived.
Six months ago, I was shocked when I first heard about the existence and the imminent publishing of another book by Harper Lee. As details emerged, the new book, it seemed, was not just another book by Lee, but one that was set in the same place and dealt with the same characters. Ten days ago,
In the last week, the book,
The quality of the story really isn’t what’s bothering me. My first quibble is with the fact that publishing Watchman endorses the sad truth that the world has been reduced to one where insatiable consumerism trumps quality art and literature. That by giving readers Watchman , the publishers (and Lee’s managers) are catering to the self-involved “what’s next” obsession of the “market”. We now occupy a pop-culture universe which is built on sequels. No successful book is anything less than a trilogy. No successful movie will not have a part two. My daughter, who is nine years old, and who has grown up in this ecosystem which consistently believes that more is more, assumes the default option for a film is to have a part two and a part three, all the way up to seven Harry Potters. TV shows come back season after season. And Superhero franchises have churned out so many sequels that they are now filming prequels. This obsession is most acutely demonstrated by the virtual stand-off that fans of Game of Thrones have had with its author, George RR Martin. In the six years that Martin took between the fourth and the fifth volume, “fans” were impatient to the point of being abusive. It is this loutish sense of entitlement readers and viewers demonstrate that the publisher of Watchman is feeding right into.
To my mind, reading, at its core, is an act of creation, not consumption. It is not the sum of letters adding up to words, words adding up to sentences and paragraphs. Reading is the craft of etching the images from the words. It is not just the reader’s task to provide a third dimension to the story, it is her privilege. By having Lee tell me what to think of Scout, Jem and Atticus beyond the pages of Mockingbird , I am denied the privilege of owning the images in my head and doing what I please with them.
The worst thing about living in the time of Watchman is having to acknowledge that the time of Mockingbird is well and truly past. I read that book again and again because there weren’t many others. Mockingbird tells of a time when things were so scarce that every little thing was precious, when the smallest of indulgences had to be meticulously sought and carefully treasured. When most things weren’t made in China — easy to acquire, easier to dispose. Mockingbird is the ultimate rendition of a time when possessions were few, but possibilities were endless. It’s dreadful to contemplate the end of that innocence.
( Veena Venugopal is editor BL ink and author of The Mother-in-Law )
Follow Veena on Twitter @veenavenugopal