My first novel was gifted to me by my uncle (my mom’s brother) who had found it on a vacated aeroplane seat. He is almost illiterate when it comes to English.
I couldn’t read a single word of it. Forget about English, those day I couldn’t even read Hindi (my national language), or for that matter, Punjabi (my mother tongue). Most of my English vocabulary, I think, comes from that book. The title of the book was…ok, I don’t remember it, or may be it was The Last Frontier, or something like that. Although it was a book for the grownups (I was 11 or 12), I used to pretend reading it. Nobody in my family or in the neighborhood had ever seen such a thick English book, and even though they knew I could not read a single world, my mere presence with that book in my hand used to be awesome for everybody.
That book remained with me, unread, for more than 6 years. I wasn’t much of a reader, but something in that book attracted me once. Maybe someone had told me there was lots of sex-talk in English novels. So one day I sat down on my table with that book, and a pocket dictionary, and started reading it. I had to refer to the dictionary after every second word and luckily, I have been bestowed with lots of patience. After a few days I got fedup of looking for the same word again and again, because I kept forgetting them. Now, the book truly had some “sex talk”, along with having a captivating story. To that novel and the dictionary, I added two more things to the excercise — a pen and a notebook. I would write the words and their meanings and try to memorize them before proceeding. Since an averagely good written novel has all the practical words, by the time I finished the novel — in three or four months — I had quite a good vocabulary.
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