the Curious Incident of the dog at the night time....

It  was in my teens that I read 'Delilah';  a Malayalam short story of which I cannot recollect much now except that, the story was ended with an actual computer pseudo code depicting an infinite loop.

 While True

Print "Delilah";

End;

Story was a modern adaptation of the Biblical legend of Samson and Delilah (?)  and The context was like; Some one (Samson?) falls into a well and screams the name of his love, "Delilah" and the author wanted to convey that the scream went on and on and he thought the best way to describe this, was through a computer program with no ‘break’ statements written.

(Maythil Radhakrishnan)

That story was written by ‘Maythil Radhakrishnan', a computer geek turned writer who was also a genius in other fields like photography, entomology and so on. He also edited the science supplement of a leading English daily called 'Indian Express' in those days.Ever since ‘Delilah’, I became a serious ‘Maythil’ reader, who would go any length to collect his books and devour it in no time. I remember visiting a book publisher’s warehouse in search of his books those were printed in 70’s and disappeared from the book houses as no one liked to read them. ‘Maythil’ revolutionized Malayalam Literature with a series of books and loved to describe himself as the first eco-political poet of Malayalam. A big number of people were deeply attracted to that Neo-intellectual wave and I was on of them. We were called ‘Maythilians’   in our circles as most of our conversations were started or ended with a ‘Maythilian’ quote.

Many years passed and slowly my reading habit gave way to more interesting pastimes like 'chess'.

And now, after all these years I got a similar ‘Maythil’-ian kick from one little novel which I read recently.

That was, 'The Curious incident of Dog at the night time', a book written by the Brit, Mark Haddon, which was published in the year 2003, and won many reputed awards like ‘Whitebread- Book of the year’ , ‘Commonwealth writer’s prize’ and many other reputed awards and nominations.

(Mark Haddon)

'Unputdownable' is the word which I would steal from a regular book reviewer's terminology to describe the reading experience. The book is presented as a diary that a 15 year old boy keeps and it’s about his investigation on the mysterious murder of a dog in his neighborhood. As he uncovers, the truth behind this, he also unknowingly uncovers some facts which are much more mysterious than the dog and its death itself, which would also change his life for ever. Our hero is not like any other kid that you find in your neighborhood or in some Enid Blyton books. He is Christopher, an unusually talented boy, who is deeply inspired by ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (He loves Holmes, but he dislikes Arthur Conan Doyle as he thinks Doyle was a stupid as he believed supernatural things). What makes him more special is the fact that he suffered from Asperger’s syndrome which is a genetic disorder that falls under the wider spectrum of Autism. Children suffer from this disorder show intense interest in certain things. Wiki has an interesting article on this.

The back cover of the book reads;

“Fifteen-year-old Christopher has a photographic memory. He understands maths. He understands science. What he can’t understand are other human beings.”

  Mark usually writes children fiction and this book was an exception; a book which can be thoroughly enjoyable to people of any age.

Just take some samples from the book.

“Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.”

Let’s see how he debates with a priest on the existence of ‘Heaven’;

“I said that there wasn't anything outside the universe and there wasn't another kind of place altogether.

Except that there might be if you went through a black hole, but a black hole is what is called a

singularity, which means it is impossible to find out what is on the other side because the gravity of a

black hole is so big that even electromagnetic waves like light can't get out of it, and electromagnetic

waves are how we get information about things which are far away. And if heaven was on the other side

of a black hole, dead people would have to be fired into space on rockets to get there, and they aren't or

people would notice.”

I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on

living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the

rubbish. “

(A child suffering from Asperger's Syndrome staring at
a molecular model that he is obsessed with-Wiki)

And in the same chapter, among all these grey verses of rationality, you suddenly find the lyrical beauty of his innocent thoughts on his dead mother.

“But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burned and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn't ask at the crematorium because I didn't go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the

Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rain forests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere”

I don’t intent to be a total spoiler here but strongly suggest this book to every one who loves a ‘different’ and quick read for a refreshing experience.