It's like a page taken out of a storybook but the difference is, it's a page from my life.
I remember it was late afternoon, the usual time when I get out of my house to play with the kids in the neighborhood, and like many other times I did before, I went to the house of a neighbor with whom my family was close to. My sister and I had been friends with the kids and our parents had been in good relations. I had seen the tiny bookshelf in the outer living room/veranda many times but I never inspected it closely - well, I was just an 8 or 9-year-old kid, and my "world of books" was different. But that auspicious afternoon, I decided to get past the narrow side of the coffee table to get a closer look - and out of the 20-something books, the rustic golden-yellow with a mix of brown cover had caught my attention.
It wasn't a "love at first sight", I was just a kid who was now learning more complex words and trying to get better at reading. It's a story about how a kid was met with a world so different from what she previously encountered, but not too different. After all, she had started learning about the kings that ruled this side of the world and about the stone age and some of the ancient civilizations; only barely started. The pages that contained those historic knowledge were too limited to her liking, 2 to 3 pages maximum, but she would read them over and over again just to visualize how it'd all looked. But when she got her hand in that rustic golden book, she didn't put it down for hours. And all the stories about a few hidden treasures around the world had mesmerized her. When she was reading about the sunken treasure, she would draw a wreck of a ship at the bottom of the sea with its mast and sail tattered, broken yet still hanging. The story of the Incan Empire and Machu Picchu was her favorite of them all.
Over the years, the kid had read it many times and the book was nearly as tattered as those sunken ships, but she carried those stories in her heart till she became Me.
By now I guess I don't have to say much of anything about what the book contains. Honestly, I haven't read any other book by the author ভবেশ রায়, nor do I know anything about him besides his name. Surprisingly, I didn't even find it in goodreads. I haven't read many books, a few of those would be considered "must-reads" and popular and the others are, for the lack of a better word, hype at best. I'd say I'm guilty of not reading too many and I'm willing to change that, but I wonder if any of those books will ever leave a lasting impression as this single book has managed to leave.
Perhaps, it's not a "love at first sight" story, but I had grown to love this book and still have a place for it in my mind.
I had the book when I was a kid, and due to unfortunate circumstances, it's not with me anymore. If only you can imagine how much the 9 years old me had liked this book that even after 2 decades since she last read it, she still remembers so much of it, you'd now see her spending her time on Youtube watching "See U in history" channel.
