My Impulse To Study Literature

The weight of a book in my hand was the first feeling I learned to cherish. Books, and the stories they held, were my first possessions as a child. This love affair first sprung between my eyes and frayed spines tucked between library shelves. My father saw books as an unnecessary extravagance, empty pages bound by a gilded quasi-intelligence. Perhaps his stern view made me yearn for books more, a farcical whisper of elementary rebellion. So when my mom quietly tucked the soft olive-green book with the yellow letters ‘Secret Garden’ etched into my backpack, I felt as if I was gifted treasure. I coveted the uncut pages, the crackling paper, the faded ink, and most of all, my name written on the front cover in my mom’s neat handwriting. This book was mine, a feeling foreign and tantalizing and electrifying and forbidding all at once. I felt as though the shot had fired in a marathon to read every book I laid eyes on. As though I was both the lamb and the lion, a creature simultaneously devouring and being devoured by words. Gujarati was my first language, a tongue I spoke and heard at home. Yet it was my foreign love of English that nurtured my literary appetite.

My first years of school jettisoned me to the bottom of the class, placing a glass barrier between me and my peers. But as I began to read, the glass started cracking. I learned of new words, new phrases, new traditions. Each book was a hammer in disguise, and like Thor, I emerged atop of the classroom hill with lightning striking behind me. My elementary classrooms boasted four shelves of children’s stories. It was not enough. I craved bigger books with bigger words, volumes dripping with languid travels and histrionic romances.

One day, I came home to a gleaming Colton Public Library card resting atop my pillow. An hour later, my mom watched in disbelief as my tiny, nine-year old frame balanced a stack of ten books to the counter. This became our ritual every Friday. The dusty space beneath my bed began to overflow with clandestine novels bubbling secrets in English. I knew I was trespassing into a world which was not my own. I knew my own family was different, our food was different, our holidays were different, and our worries were different. But when I opened the first page to a book, I opened a door to a new world. I stumbled into stories as if physically there, inhabiting characters fully, at once immersed and invisible. I took trips with my fictional friends behind their houses into moonlit woods, watching them pluck berries and pretend to be kings and queens and drink cordial and lie in rippling grass. I dreamed of becoming characters, living in their world. I wrapped myself in a balmy blanket of their stories, a blanket I thought I would never shed. But as I grew into my adolescence, my father taught me that his American Dream solely rested upon red bricks of science and math. My love of literature retreated into an unused corner of my mind, collecting dust. I spent the second half of my childhood stripped of the comfort I had known, my innate desire becoming prickly to the touch. My mother tongue had bitten me into submission.

My impulse to study literature manifested into a small bird within me – aimlessly flitting around, trying to find an escape out of the glass windows that encaged me once again. This glass fractured in the sweltering summer before my senior year. My mom’s diagnosis left me angry and hurt and scared, but most of all, heated. My mom gave me the stories that I learned to love, she gave me the pages that I grew from. I will not let her forget the world she had given me. She wrote my name on the front cover of the first book. I know now that I will write her name on the first page of my book. I began to feverently reread all of my favorite novels from my childhood. I experienced the same thrill, the same love, the same indescribable fascination with strings of words that felt like both a hug and an abyss. But as I encountered familiar faces and stories, I no longer felt the urge to explore their worlds, but the need to create my own.

For my entire life, I sought to have my identity tied to a land as characters did. But I belong to neither my parents’ land nor the land under my feet. When I become a writer, my desk becomes my home. I trespass into foreign land in every story, belonging only to my characters and my pen. My pen is a culmination of my fervor for language, my desire to capture life, my love for my mom, my identity.

I am an amalgam of contradictory ideas. I inherited two conflicting worlds, yet my identity cannot exist without the other. My story is chaotic and unfinished. It is mine.