Theloopylululog

We are like books. Most people only see our cover, the minority read only the introduction, many people believe the critics. Few will know our content.

~Emile Zola

For as long as I remember, books have been the world I choose to enter when I need company. My Dad moved a lot due to his job and that meant changing schools. Often leading to cutting ties with bonds made with the precious non chalance of childhood.

Books have been friends, therapists, teachers and family when loneliness bit too hard. What started as seeking company soon shifted to a joy that remains unparalled till date.

I was a sucker for short stories in school. Somehow a big fat tome didn’t make sense to me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to donate all my time to a book that was too big to hold in my tiny hands.

The small shelf that was my library 30 years ago was happy enough to accommodate as many short story books as it could. And there were many. Bought off thrift stores and streets that held sunday markets, the shelf was left creaking in a matter of a very short time.

Aesop’s fables and Panchatantra, mythological stories from Greece and Egypt, O.Henry’s works and short abridged versions of Shakespeare; Nancy Drew and Famous Five; you name it and I had them all.

But one book that caught my attention as I turned 14 is a novella that has stayed with me all these years. Not just because it deflowered my rigid will-never-read-a-novel virginity, but also for the life affirming lessons it left behind.

R. L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde remains to date the book that I must have read the most number of times. It was in many ways my first love. A book I revisited every May ever since I first read it in 1996.

It left an impact in me that was at once deep and intense. The horror and terror I went through while reading it is unmatched.

What makes a human good? Am I a good human being? These are questions I remember asking myself from a very young age. Hurting someone or even a small insect left me sad and brooding for months…which I would spend ripping myself apart for the choices I made, ashamed of being bad when I had the choice to be good.

This book by Stevenson without making any pretense about it opened me to a spiritual quest that turned out to be a blessing for my future adult self.

Until I read this book, I was unaware of the basal nature of us humans. Call it what you will; naivete or just blissful ignorance of girlhood, this nature that resides within all of us, lying dormant until triggered did not make itself known to me until much later in life. Unleashing itself on unsuspecting humans at moments when cruelty makes more sense than kindness.

Good and bad are two sides of the same coin, most often blurred by a very thin line. We toe this thin line everyday, sometimes falling off the ridge to either side of it depending on who we are at that particular moment in our lives. What decides an act to be good or bad? That is a question we need to answer ourselves BEFORE we act on our impulses.

For most part of the book, you are clear of what’s happening. There is a personification of good in the form of Jekyll, a law abiding scientist. Respected for his gentlemanly personality. On the other side, is Mr. Hyde; a devil in human disguise. Not literally. But he is the western counterpart of Ravana. Crude, violent, a bully who turns out to be a rapist and murderer half way through. And the worst? He enjoys the depravity. Hurting another gives him pleasure. Soon to become an addiction. No wonder Jekyll finds him an abomination.

And then comes the twist in the tale. Something you never see coming. A horrifying climax that literally left me agasp. I remember having nightmares for days on end after I finished the novella.

It being the first book that was NOT a short story book makes it a matter of honour for me. The pace, the blindingly hot twist and the sheer thrill kept me going. I finished it one night just before I went to bed. I was never the same again.

To this day, I wonder what inspired Stevenson to write this gothic thriller.

To this day, it remains the book I go back to, when I ponder about the duality of human nature. The paradox of being human is that we are both good and bad. The divine and the evil rests within us. Light and dark dance within us in equal measure. It is entirely upto us to choose who we are and who we become. The paradox of human life lies in the unlimited choices available for us and our freewill to choose one amongst them that not ust serves us but serves the greatest good of all of humanity.

This book stands testimony to freewill being the sentinel of human life. Who we become is not entirely dependent on our circumstances but in essence in what we choose to become under any circumstances. We are all in equal parts Ram/Jekyll and Ravana/Hyde. Who we let to lead our lives, be the driver of our choices makes all the difference.