Ten Years Since Mockingbird

Ten years ago, I had just joined The School-K.F.I, the place that has made me what I am today. Being a new student I was desperately trying to fit in to the place where I would go on to meet some of the most important people in my life. It was also the time when I was 1st exposed to serious literature in the form of a book called To Kill A Mockingbird. We did it together in class with Jayshree Akka our English teacher. We would take turns and read the book and then discuss it. Mockingbird made us wake up to the society around us. It threw up questions for us about things we were unaware of, or had at best a vague and confused knowledge of. For those of you who don’t know the book is about growing up in America in the 30s when there was still open discrimination between blacks and whites. It is about a white lawyer who fights for an Afro-American wrongly accused of raping a white girl. But most unforgettably it is about those two kids-Jem & Scout, and Boo Radley. Boo is the most enigmatic and haunting character I have come across in literature. This character, not seen until the final pages of the book is made a monster of by the town because of certain rumours. And the way Harper Lee (the author) describes him from the point of view of those kids made us all shudder. There is an incident when the kids are playing and their ball falls into the neighboring Radley house. They are terrified to get the ball fearing that Boo (who incidentally never comes out) will do something awful to them. And Jayshree Akka never once told us until we came to the climax, so to speak, that Boo Radley was such a hero!

It was the way we all read this book together which also made it so special. 12-13 years old at that time things like racial discrimination (read caste, in our country’s context), rape, etc were stuff we were blissfully unaware of .Ok, we had seen a few crude rape scenes from a few crude movies, but it was something which we probably did not fully comprehend. But reading through the book and our teacher putting things in perspective, gave some of us our first true insight into the real world. Even a small character like the Finch housemaid was so poignant. And those unforgettable lines after Boo rescues the kids, which Scout narrates in retrospect-

“ Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.”

They just make me cry & cry & cry & cry & cry.

Ten years have gone by since we did Mockingbird. Ten years of joy & sorrow; triumphs & disappointments; and inevitably- change. God only know what the next ten will bring. Some of us will be married and settled and all. But one thing I am a certain of –Mockingbird and so many other wonderful things that we shared and indeed still share will always give us comfort and reassurance. For some things are far more eternal than the ravages of time.