Books: Your journey is not an easy one

As difficult as it is to read the last few pages of a book, it’s equally tough to start a new book. It feels like a new chapter in your life. You feel you were already in some other part of the world sometime back and suddenly your life has taken a turn again and landed you somewhere else. Initially, you hate that change. You don’t want to accept it. This thought came to me when last night I finished reading Haruki Murakami’s Elephant Vanishes and today immediately picked up Robert Galbraith aka JK Rowling’s Silkworm to read.

Today a sensation of nostalgia went past my body when I was introduced to a city in some other corner of the world, new people, new surrounding and a completely different plot. Until past few days I was strolling in the lazy afternoons of the laidback cities of Japan. I was witnessing the lonely lives of the protagonists, their dilemmas, their inner conflicts. In almost all the short stories of Elephant Vanishes, Murakami had staged his stories in the summer time of the year and I can presume by his stories, the summer there is as torturing there as it is in India. My mind sweated so many times reading how the heat of the sun not just penetrated the land mower’s t shirt but his mind as well. He mostly showed the areas of the cities which were not densely inhabited. The characters spoke more to themselves than with others. Soliloquies superseded conversations. They were their own companions in this loneliness. These people were no extra ordinary human beings. They were the common people that may just travel past us any day and our minds would deliberately choose to ignore them. But they were content, surrendered themselves to what they received in life. I somehow developed a liking for them, a sort of unsaid friendship occurred between us. They started to look like the people of my life.

And today, suddenly I found myself standing amidst the bustling streets of London city, flooded with interesting characters like journalists and detectives. JK Rowling it is, of course. Completely opposed to the nonchalant life portrayed by Murakami, Rowling’s world is an escape from the mundane life of the reader. Her world is thrilling, miraculous, ambitious, full of twists and turns. You are hooked to the mystery, and no matter how badly you batter your brains, you always end up reading the unexpected.

I am on the 11th of the total of 455 pages book. Though I am feeling nostalgic right now, I know that gradually I will start getting familiar to the people of this world, settle down in this new place and adapt to this new journey. And by the end of the book, Rowling would do the same to me what Murakami had done now.