Breadcrumb Trail

"Stand up and read aloud."

Almost two decades might have passed since the order struck panic like an arrow straight to the centre of my chest, and I can still feel it.

I stood up, clutching the book to cover my face and began to read slowly.

If I search for it, I can probably even find the book somewhere in my house, collecting dust and outlasting the timidity that I donned. 

"She...gr..grew..up. They...do...but..."

"Reread the sentence."

"She grew up. They do bu-"

"What is that word? Read it again."

"They."

"Read the word that comes after it."

"Do but"

"You are not sitting down until you read that word properly."

I was clutching the book closer to my face to hide my tears. 

"Lower your book and read it again."

I lowered it, and croaked, "Do but."

Everyone started whispering around me. I didn't know what to do. I didn't see anything but 'do but'. The bullying went on for a while until the teacher realised she wasn't going to get through to me and told me to sit down. 

Doubt.

Doubt was the name of the poison that the arrow was doused in. 

I'm not sure how the teacher made me believe that I was stupid when she didn't realise that if I did not know that the 'b' was silent, I wasn't going to magically know it just because she tortured me. 

I cringed every time this incident came to mind, and I hated myself for it. 

When my mum walked me to school, she would hold my hand and teach me new words. We always walked past a 'Veterinary Hospital' and she would ask me to spell it everyday.  

I remember when I asked my parents to buy me a dictionary and when my dad bought me a baby blue one. I would lie on the cold hardwood floor with the dictionary and the books I borrowed from the library. I studied pronunciations and the meanings of words to revel in the story. I asked my mum many questions and made her read the stories that I wrote. 

It reminds me of a song, 'Ours'. There is a line from the song that sums up what my mum did for me, "I'll fight their doubt and give you faith with this song for you... because I love the gap between your teeth and I love the riddles that you speak."

I read more books than anybody else in my year. Reading became an obsession for me. It gave me my personality and made me breeze through all my English exams without ever trying. 

This blog, too, is a product of my reading. Only the 5-year-old can truly know the value of every word that I write to you. But I must apologise to those of you who have been waiting for a post from me. I apologise for the random breaks that I take from posting without notice. I will try and do that less. 

Maybe I took a break because I needed it or maybe it is because of the poison that I still carry in my body. But then, I accidentally stumbled upon the folder containing messages about my blog from my parents saying they were proud of me, from my English teacher (a different English teacher who didn't 'doubt' me) saying that her husband really liked one of my articles, from a kid I've seen grow up who did more marketing for the blog than I ever did... They acted like an antidote.

There is a book that I read last year called, 'I Who Have Never Known Men', by Jacqueline Harpman. I would describe the novel as a thought experiment- thirty-nine women and a girl are imprisoned underground with nothing but the bare essentials and each other's company. The girl has been in this prison since she was a child, she doesn't know or remember the outside world. She escapes the prison and the book is from her perspective as she learns about the concept of time, feminism, love, conflict, grief and intimacy. 

In the prison, where there was no clock or sun, the women learned to tell time as the girl grew up. One of my favourite lines in the book is- "Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others." 

Maybe I learned to tell time by watching the transition from my parents teaching me spelling to them asking me when my next post is due. In a way, maybe that is what we do for each other. Maybe we acquire each other's time. As I wrote these words with you in mind, the moment belonged to you. As you're reading this, this moment of yours belongs to me. 

I bookmark my life by writing about moments, words that move me, media that I've consumed, and people I have met. These bookmarks are like the breadcrumbs that Hansel and Gretel dropped to mark the trail back home. Each person who reads what I write, even if it is just me in the future, makes the breadcrumb trail a little less perishable. I realised I benefit from this blog through means that can't be measured. 

I will leave you today, with yet another bookmark- this time, by an author named Nicole Lyons- "I hope that someday when I am gone, someone, somewhere, picks my soul up off of these pages and thinks, 'I would have loved her.'"