But it’s a children’s book!” I protested to my uncle. It was whispered in family circles that my uncle had successfully evaded the tedium of adulthood well into his fourth decade. I, on the other hand, was a veteran of two full years of employment and expected better from myself. Meanwhile, the boy on the cover looked at me in mute appeal from atop his broomstick. With a resigned sigh, I turned the page and read out loud: “Chapter 1: The Boy Who Lived.”
It was 1998, and everything was about to change forever, although I did not know it yet. By the time I learnt that Dudley looked like a pig in a wig, I was hopelessly committed — to a seven-book marathon that would unfold over a decade, eight film adaptations, multiple collectors’ editions and the eventual choice to be an author myself.
Dear J.K. Rowling,
You ruined my peaceful, predictable existence forever.
I read the first one and re-read it repeatedly, until I borrowed a copy of Chamber of Secrets, for I had read Philosopher’s Stone a year late, and the second book in the series had already been published. I read the first two books a fortnight apart.
I knew that I had never read anything quite like it before. I knew that it was something quite special. Waiting for the third instalment was agony. When Prisoner of Azkaban arrived, I devoured it in the way one binges through a large bar of chocolate and ends with a sigh of satisfaction.
Big as the books were worldwide, the Higginbothams on M.G. Road in Bangalore was not crowded when I bought Book 3. This was the last Harry Potter I read in India.
Months later, I flew out to the United States — where, in a nondescript suburban town in a nondescript suburban apartment, I witnessed the first-day release madness of Goblet of Fire. The queue ran the length of the mall where the bookstore was. I behaved badly. Innocent children were elbowed and shoved, is all I shall say on the subject.
This time the book was fatter. It took me the whole weekend.
Dear JKR, your writing style is as addictive as dessert. It is whimsically innocent when the wizarding world reveals itself to Harry but takes sly digs at the absurd pomposity of adults (only the very pompous can work at a place named Grunnings). Somehow you know how to talk to boys as well as girls.
However, before I can peg you as a combination of Roald Dahl, Richmal Crompton and Biggles, there appears the Enid Blyton-style boarding school structure — all topped with a smart mystery twist that would make Conan Doyle sit up and take notice from the great beyond, plus, a quest that rivals Tolkien. In short, you defy easy categorisation.
And boy, are you funny! My favourite slice of boyish humour in the series is when the Marauder’s Map insults an officious Professor Snape with an excessively polite address which then rapidly deteriorates into the funniest of over-the-top insults I have ever come across in a book!
“Mr. Moony presents his compliments to Professor Snape, and begs him to keep his abnormally large nose out of other people’s business. Mr. Prongs agrees with Mr. Moony, and would like to add that Professor Snape is an ugly git. Mr. Padfoot would like to register his astonishment that an idiot like that ever became a professor. Mr. Wormtail bids Professor Snape good day, and advises him to wash his hair, the slimeball.”
HINKYPUNKS AND NARGLES
Pottermania reached its peak in the two years from 2000 to 2002. Warner Bros announced it’s going to make a film series. The fifth book was due; impatience was at fever pitch, for everyone knew that Voldemort was back.
The first two films were released. People loved (director) Chris Columbus, people hated Chris Columbus. I relocated to London. I also quit the information technology industry to begin teaching. Sometimes, I wonder if you had nudged me into it.
Order of the Phoenix was released on June 21, 2003. I do not remember if it was at midnight, but I do remember taking a double-decker bus to Piccadilly, past the five-storeyed Waterstones where you were signing books.
I saw a queue of children and adults in wizard hats circle the entrance and go all around the block in multiple spirals. I took a photograph on my then state-of-the-art camera phone (I wish I had taken one with a real camera now, for that one has gone the way of all digital ephemera).
I bought my copy and found fellow readers on London buses and the Underground the next day. We nodded at each other and smiled briefly, before returning to our respective places in the story.
Major characters are almost always sketched out well, but how often are minor characters as endearing? Calling someone Nearly Headless Nick is a touch of comic genius. Ditto for Hinkypunks and Nargles. Whether it is the Fat Lady nursing a hangover after Christmas when she drank all the wine in another portrait, or Sir Cadogan challenging everyone to a duel when they wanted to enter the Gryffindor common room, you made them funny, lovable and never cloying.
“‘Farewell!’ cried the knight, popping his head into a painting of some sinister-looking monks. ‘Farewell, my comrades-in-arms! If ever you have need of noble heart and steely sinew, call upon Sir Cadogan!’”
“‘Yeah, we’ll call you,’ muttered Ron as the knight disappeared, ‘if we ever need someone mental.’”
A BETTER, KINDER, LESS APATHETIC WORLD
Then there was this one memorable day at the school where I taught in which all the middle-school kids disappeared for an audition at the nearby Shepperton Studios, where Harry Potter was being filmed. They needed many children for The Goblet of Fire, the film. Teaching them the day before and the day after was like the Weasley twins’ exit from Hogwarts — chaotic!
If writing is like cooking, you are the chef with the lightest souffles. Your themes are heavy. In a series dealing with death and immortality, tolerance and bigotry, kindness and cruelty, depression, untreatable illnesses, disability, racism — your dark humour never makes us suspect that your intent is to open up the minds of the young for a better, kinder, less apathetic world.
When you write about Dobby and his lamp-like eyes, you write also about the horrors of slavery. With gentle, heroic Remus Lupin, it is about the ostracism faced by those who are HIV-positive. With Mad-Eye Moody, you give us a hero with disabilities. You whip up your medicine in a delectable recipe that kept us all engaged for a decade.
You do not make the mistake of creating tiresomely and relentlessly noble characters. Dobby may be tragic, but he also embodies the awkward humour in situations when people try to help us in clumsy ways; Lupin is a modern twist on the Greek hero whom we all adore, with his secret fatal flaw; Moody is a crazy old teacher who can just about get away with changing an obnoxious Draco Malfoy into a ferret.
The good comes with traces of the bad, and the bad with traces of goodness. The same Draco Malfoy shrinks from killing. Snape loves truly and heroically. Sirius Black is a lovable father figure and an arrogant bully.
Your worst villains are those who are cruel, in big and small ways. Voldemort is terrifying, yes, but possibly the cruellest of them all is Dolores Umbridge with her fondness for bubblegum pink and sadism in equal measure. You explain depression to children as well as anyone could without spelling it out — “a cold, slimy, black external presence with the power to overwhelm the best of us and the best in us, leaving only a shell”.
Two decades later, I am old enough to finally realise how truthful you were in your description.
I stayed in London long enough for the book series to finish, but not the films. By the time Half-Blood Prince was released as a film, I was back in India, this time for good. And I began to write — idly, at first, then with increased focus. I became a writer of young adult fiction, with hardly any prospects of success, people told me. I got published, to my great astonishment. A sequel followed. There is some fame, of the inconvenient kind. I can no longer elbow little children out of the way to get my hands on the next Harry Potter.
Jash Sen is the author of young adult adventures The Wordkeepers and its sequel, Skyserpents
