My Bookish Desires

Two books roused desire in me while I was in school, an adolescent. These books were Jean Webster’s novel, ‘Daddy-Long-Legs’, and Danielle Steel’s novel, ‘Wings’. Desire, while in school, was a mushy thing that seemed to melt inside my being or break out of a fist-sized, fist-shaped cage and flow out freely, leaving an elation in its wake. I was in school in the 1990s. Years later, in mid-2000s, when I saw on TV the advertisement of the chocolate lava cake of Domino’s Pizza – thick, lava-like, deep brown chocolate flowing out of a crusty, baked object – I felt that that desire that I felt in school was the same like this viscous, lava-like chocolate. With each book, with each kind of desire I felt, each layer of that cake crumbled.

Both the books I mentioned are different from one another. They were written and published at different times. ‘Daddy-Long-Legs’ was first published in the year 1912, while ‘Wings’ was published more than eighty years later, in 1995. Their genres are different. ‘Daddy-Long-Legs’ could be placed in the young adult category, while ‘Wings’, with an adult theme and mostly adult characters, could be placed in the genre romance category. Their appearances are different. ‘Daddy-Long-Legs’ is an illustrated (by the author herself) volume of about 190 pages. I have the paperback Puffin Classics edition published in 1989. ‘Wings’, like most novels for adults, has only text, no illustration, and spans nearly 450 pages. The copy I own is the paperback edition published by Corgi Books, a division of Transworld Publishers. I found two things common between both books. Both books have female characters in the lead: Jerusha Abbott (aka Judy) in ‘Daddy-Long-Legs’ and Cassandra O’Malley (aka Cassie aka Cass) in ‘Wings’; and both the heroines are far younger than the men they fall in love with. I fell in love with the books and with the men Judy and Cassie fell in love with: respectively, the eponymous Daddy-Long-Legs and Nick Galvin (aka Nick).

In ‘Daddy-Long-Legs’, the Daddy-Long-Legs was a man the heroine, Judy, had not seen. But Judy, who was an orphan, knew this man because he was paying for her education and, as a rule, she had to write him a letter every month about news from her school, etc. Since it was strange to write letters to a person without a name, Judy decided to address her benefactor in the letters as “Daddy-Long-Legs”. She chose that appellation because the only time she saw that man, it was thus:

“Jerusha caught only a fleeting impression of the man—and the impression consisted entirely of tallness. He was waving his arm toward an automobile waiting in the curved drive. As it sprang into motion and approached, head on for an instant, the glaring headlights threw his shadow sharply against the wall inside. The shadow pictured grotesquely elongated legs and arms that ran along the floor and up the wall of the corridor. It looked, for all the world, like a huge, wavering daddy-long-legs.”

Thus began a series of really endearing and mushy letters in which Judy addresses her benefactor in several variations of Daddy-Long-Legs: “Dear Daddy-Long-Legs”, “Mr. Daddy-Long-Legs”, “Daddy”, “Mr. Daddy-Long-Legs Smith”, “Dear D. L. L.”, “D. L. L. Smith”, and even “Comrade”, “Ship ahoy, Cap’n Long-Legs!”, “John Smith”, and – in her first letter to her benefactor – “Dear Kind-Trustee-Who-Sends-Orphans-to-College”.

There is a twist ending, something that my perceptive self had guessed quite early on while reading the book. Or maybe I was watching a lot of films and TV—it was the mid-1990s after all and I was reading a book first published in 1912! I am sure some of you who are reading this article but have not read ‘Daddy-Long-Legs’ too must have guessed that twist ending. The journey to this ending is a real delight, marked by some very sweet letters and beautiful line drawings.

The kind of desire that Jean Webster’s ‘Daddy-Long-Legs’ aroused in me was that first step of desire, of getting to see that prototype/ideal person one could fall in love with; a person who is, to use the cliché, just out of a book or out of a story. It was, perhaps, the time, my age. The time when we are in school, when we have crushes. I was a student and Jerusha Abbott too was a student, so I could identify with her character. Also, letters. ‘Daddy-Long-Legs’ is a novel built up entirely of letters. In the 1990s, letters were an important part of our school education. There used to be compulsory questions in English and Hindi grammar papers which required us to write various kinds of letters: letters to friends, letters to one’s parents, application to the school principal or one’s employer seeking leave, letter to the editor of a newspaper regarding a report published in that newspaper or to draw the paper’s attention towards a social issue, letter to a civic body to get the potholes filled, letter to the landlord to get a leaky tap or a dripping roof fixed (letter to a landlord!—who writes that? In the place where I am posted, if something goes wrong in my rented ground-floor house, I immediately go and bang at the door of my landlord on the first floor), and various other letters. School life and letters gave me an immediate connection with the novel. Once I found that connect, I was engrossed in reading about Judy and her life, which then made me feel the desire that she felt. And that desire was the innocent kind of desire, the middle-school desire, the beginning-of-the-attraction phase desire—a desire as sweet as a chocolate lava cake.

The desire that Danielle Steel’s ‘Wings’ aroused in me was more adult kind of, few rungs higher than the one generated by ‘Daddy-Long-Legs’. ‘Wings’ is a retelling of Amelia Earhart’s story, with fictional characters and a happy ending. Cassie loves to fly. Her war veteran father, Pat, wants his son to fly, but it is Cassie who is into planes and flying. Nick Galvin, one of Pat’s co-pilot’s during the First World War, teaches Cassie how to fly. Every morning, after finishing her share of household chores, Cassie would lie to her mother that she was going to the library or tell some other lie, pack a sandwich and an apple in a paper bag and hold a dollar from her savings, and take a 45-minute bus ride to a different place where Nick taught her how to fly. And Nick became the object of my attention as I read ‘Wings’.

Several years later, when I was studying in the medical college, I remember I had a Cassie O’Malley-ish feeling because I too came to the college in a bus and often kept an apple with me. Anyway, this is to be discussed some other time. Desire, first.

There is one line in ‘Wings’ that has stayed with me for more than twenty years. I am unable to exactly quote that line, and Google is not helping me much. I am looking for quotes from Danielle Steel’s ‘Wings’ and Google is giving me image results for books like Rachelle North’s ‘Baseball Rockstar’ and Carly Phillips’s ‘Dirty Sexy Cuffed’! When I read that line in 1996, I had no idea that I would be writing about it in 2018. Had I known, I would have certainly marked that line or that page. In that line, Nick expresses his desire to make Cassie pregnant. (Or was it about having babies with her? Anyway, they mean the same.) He does not say it aloud, it is in his mind. There is one line that I saw while leafing through ‘Wings’ now: “[Nick] kissed [Cassie] again then, thinking of the babies he would have with her, and never would.”

Nick was not married and Cassie’s parents treated him like a son. There was an 18-year age gap between Nick and Cassie. But they were both adults and they loved one another. In fact, Nick loved Cassie so much that he felt that she deserved a better man: “[Nick] would never allow himself the self-indulgence or the selfishness of marrying Cassie. No matter how much he loved her, or maybe because he did. She deserved so much better.” Nick and Cassie argued and fought and kissed one another even while they were in the middle of a fight and I found this terribly cute and mushy – “[Nick] kissed [Cassie] hard on the lips, but they both came up fighting…[Nick] kissed [Cassie] again, but nothing was resolved by the time he left” – and Nick was aware of the huge gap between their ages: “[Nick and Cassie] talked almost all night, and nothing was resolved. [Nick] kept reminding [Cassie] that he was a thirty-nine-year-old man and he was not going to marry a child, and destroy her life.”

I was 13 years old when I read ‘Wings’, and reading the lines I have quoted above and lines like, “He couldn’t leave without letting her know how much he loved her. He leaned down ever so gently, and kissed her. And she kissed him back as she had kissed no man before him”, was certainly a different feeling. The desire here was the high-school desire, the almost-on-the-verge-of-adulthood desire—it was the chocolate lava cake bursting, the lava-like viscous chocolate flowing out slowly, slowly.

In 2010, when I was already an adult, I read Manjul Bajaj’s novel, ‘Come, Before Evening Falls’ (paperback published by Hachette India in 2009, Kindle ebook published by Manjul Bajaj in 2012). Set in rural Haryana among the Jat community, ‘Come, Before Evening Falls’ is a story about love that is forbidden – Rumi’s “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field / I’ll meet you there” is the epigraph of this novel – and has a twist ending. The novel is beautiful, no doubt – it was shortlisted for The Hindu prize 2010 – but my reason for cherishing this novel is its anti-hero, Raakha. Raakha has been called a “problem child”. He was a man with “a fierce moustache” who rode a mare named Rani , “had explored every path and every by-lane to self-destruction that his father’s village had to offer”, engaged in “[d]runken brawls, fist fights, sleeping around with any woman who would have him, and with one or two others who needed persuasion”, and spent his time “hunting partridges, riding, walking, swimming, talking with itinerant holy men asking them the meaning of life”. There was something very ruthlessly masculine about Raakha, something very primal, brutish, uncaring, and spontaneous. Raakha was unapologetic and dangerously alluring, and I had an immediate adult crush on him. (Maybe some things about Raakha reminded me of someone—this too is for some other time.) In Raakha’s case, it wasn’t the cake or the lava-like chocolate. It was a full oven burning at 200-degree-Celsius.