My Favourite Book

 Books have the power to make us cry, to make us laugh. They compel us to think and make us wise to so many of our idiosyncracies. They are real and by real, I mean to say, they live! They have their own distinctive characters. You don’t feel the same after putting down every book you read. It’s a different issue thus, evoking a different response. No inanimate object, to my mind, has this tremendous capacity to calm you when you’re agitated and agitate you when you’re calm!

A good book keeps the mind on its toes for a long time. It is a rare and beautiful moment indeed, when I turn the last page and feel the nerve-ends of my brain tying themselves up in a knot in a mixture of revelation, delight and contemplation. I’ve had the good fortune of reading a number of wonderful books and I convey my heartfelt thanks to all such writers down the ages who’ve disseminated so much pleasure through their works for people like me.

One book which I can claim to carrying, at least, one gem on each page is by Harper Lee. The unforgettable novel of childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the prestigious Pulitzer prize the following year and was later made into an Academy Award winning film, also a classic.

Compassionate, dramatic and deeply moving, it takes the readers to the roots of human behaviour—to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humour and pathos. Now with over 20 million copies sold and translated into ten languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today, it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.

The book brilliantly captures the time, place and, above all, the mood of a dusty Southern town during the Depression. A white woman accuses a black man of rape. Though he is obviously innocent, the outcome of his trial, in the racially segregated social set-up, is such a foregone conclusion that no lawyer will step forward to take up the case…..except one!

Still regarding the Negroes as little better than uncivilized animals of the darkest Africa, the white population of the county have little patience with Atticus Finch who chooses to defend the young black man, Tom Robinson. However, this sub-story is introduced only to heighten the incongruity that is evident in the social world of Maycomb County….the difference between what it thinks and what it does! The county people know that Atticus is their conscience…..that what he is doing is the right thing, the ethical thing, but they take the easy way out. They take no heed of their conscience!

Atticus Finch’s compassionate defense reveals several significant facets of the book; the superb moral stature of the man himself, for one……’The one thing that doesn’t abide by what other folks say is a person’s conscience…’, he says at one point when he is asked to explain why he was raising a storm through his actions. It also gradually succeeds in showing his two motherless children, Jem and his eight-year old sister, Scout, all the justice and unfairness that make up the world. They are stunned at the acrimony and hostility they have to encounter from normally sane, reasonable people on account of their father’s actions but are also convinced that what he is doing is the only thing to do! For Atticus really has no choice. ‘Before Jem looks at anyone else, he looks at me, and I’ve tried to live so I can look squarely back at him,’ he tells the Sheriff when advised to circumvent the law on one occasion.

Harper Lee makes Scout the narrator of her tale and this is what makes her book surpass the realms of ordinariliness! Seen through her eyes, the reader is more shocked by the events than if they had been recounted by an adult, or even by Jem, who is older by four years. Heart-warming, funny, sad and sweet, the book overflows with a child’s account of what she sees in her world. She relates building a snowman with her brother with the same gusto and passion as she does the entire courtroom drama of Tom Robinson’s trial.

Ms. Lee’s loving portrayal of Maycomb County is as symbolic as it is realistic. In a closed society as theirs, the early mores and notions still hold considerable sway over is people and they are not prepared for the jolt it receives when Atticus takes his deviant route. As Ms. Maudie Atkinson, a character in the novel, tells Jem, ‘…There are some men in this world who were born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them.’ Indeed, through the array of memorable characters in the novel, the 50-year old, bespectacled figure of Atticus Finch stands apart as the morning sun, bright and radiant as the polished soul of a person, forcing others to look at their reflections and judge their own actions in the light of his uncompromising principles.

‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is a lovely book. The warm, gentle humour, the endearing childhood experiences, the innocence of half-awakened minds, the nostalgia of a quaint past are all evocative of the soothing zephyrs of twilit evenings when the garish sights and sounds of the daytime subside….and all that remains is the swish of the leaves as the wind murmurs through them, the raucous call of a home-borne curlew and the soft, rich song of the mockingbird……

I believe, the world is divided into two kinds of readers. Those who have read ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and those who haven’t…..!