Ruchir Joshi on his Favourite Childhood Reads

I believe you’re owned by different bookshelves at different periods in your life. Here is a totting up of the books that formed me till adulthood.

The Mystery of the Missing Man by Enid Blyton, Hachette 

I must have been about eight or nine, and down with measles that stopped me going to school or doing any vigorous physical activity. My mother thought this might be a good time to get me into books. I was skeptical when I began reading. By the time I finished the book I was almost crying with the desire to be a kid in rural southern England, sniffing around detectively with the Five Find-Outers.

The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare by Alistair Maclean, HarperCollins; Cade by James Hadley Chase, Mastermind Publication

The buying of new books was cut off pretty soon and I was enrolled into the lending library that sat at the back of the Oxford Book Store on Park Street. I ran through most of the twee and racist, but neverthless gripping, Blyton Aunty, and likewise most of the Agatha Christies before I tripped into the adult thriller-world of British violent-suspense merchants. I tore through all of Alistair Maclean, and started picking up the ‘dirty thrillers’ by the prolific James Hadley Chase.

The two MacLean novels set in WW2 stayed with me, not least because their film versions also made it to Calcutta’s cinemas. While Maclean’s heroes climbed sheer cliff-faces and hung from the snow-covered roofs of swaying cable cars, reading about the ace news photographer Cade was deliciously bad, his story one steep and terminal descent, brought about by a half-bikini-ed siren he first meets on a beach. I still have the well-thumbed paperbacks of these books lurking around somewhere.

The Godfather by Mario Puzo, Arrow

“Here, take this book for your father. Tell him Vidula mashi says he must read it!” My parents’ friend, the sparky aunty hands me a fat, black paperback. “And listen, this book is definitely not for you, okay? You can read it when you’re a bit older.” I was 12, and like hell I was going to wait. My father took his time reading the thick tome—about two weeks. I finished it in five days, mostly devouring it between the time I came back from school and he came back from work. The book had sex. The book had blood. The book had dialogues and memo-rable phrases: “he sleeps with the fishes”, “made his bones”. Most importantly it had life lessons about cunning, about biding your time and not revealing your cards, about not bragging or making empty (or not empty) threats. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

The Adventures of Tintin by Herge, Egmont; Asterix by Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo Little Brown Book Group

The first to hit my consciousness was Tintin. For someone who was into drawing-painting, the visuals were mind-boggling: how did this guy render things so accurately and yet imbue them with such dynamism, suspense and humour? The completist in me wanted to ingest the whole series, every story, every perfectly drawn car and aeroplane. Asterix was totally of another order. The drawings were equally beautiful but radically different, the gesture of a sketch enshrined in each frame as opposed to Herge’s orderly lines. And yet, the parallel running gags—textual and visual. They were like Nadal to Tintin’s Federer.

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