On P.G Wodehouse

(Above photo circa 2009)

My tryst with this man began around eight years ago or so when my best friend of twelve years asked me to read his books. While picking out books at a Crossword bookstore, (which has since been replaced by a fancy food retail) she made me purchase two of his books. The synesthete that I am, I picked the one with a brighter colour and a vibrant blurb and started reading it on the way back home. Two pages in and I was bored. I waved my friend away, I wasn’t one for dull and dreary British humour. I wasn’t keen to read another white man trying to be funny with a flat voice and a posh vocabulary. Oh good lord, not at all! But by Jove, years later he found a way into my heart.

Three years ago, I was swimming in a pool of existential crisis. On an angst ridden day as any other then, I realized I was out of new books to read, to retreat into. The only two that lay unread, were his books, staring at me bright eyed, literally. This time around, I was two pages in and I surprised myself laughing as loudly as I did. His creations and his writing, they were hysterical. I started devouring his books, in any way I could. If I couldn’t read, I’d put on an audiobook and go places laughing all along at B. Wooster’s eccentricities and Jeeves’ wit. Wodehouse’s words went from flat to phenomenal and I found my corner in his sense of humour.

Every time I pass a bookshop now, a little dream my friend and I share, materializes in my head. On a quiet landscape, sits a wooden bookshop café. The insides spill with stories and music and all the chaos you wouldn’t expect in a normal bookshop. The light on the signboard flickers outside – ‘The Wodehouse.’