Day 21

Your favourite book as a child:

My childhood was more or less spent with, around, and lost in books. My mother was able to make me perform many an unwelcome task(noticeably, pages of hateful sums) with the promise of a good book at the end of it all. I devoured anything and everything that I came across. As a result, I had done stupid things like reading almost all of Sharatchandra by the time I was eight.Predictably, it wasn't a very good experience.
Probably because of the global communist brotherhood, my steady supply of books as a child included a lot of Russian literature, and I loved all of it. However, my favourite, till date, remains this obscure book called Chuk ar Gek by Arkady Gaidar. I read it in a Bengali translation and my copy had a cloth cover and was filled with delightful black and white water colour illustrations. The book tells the story of two young boys called Chuk and Gek, who, along with their mother, go to visit their father in the remote Taiga. It is a beautiful beautiful book.

Onek onek durer ekta shohor. Bodh hoy sei shohorer naam Moscow. Duniyay tar theke bhalo shohor ar kotthao nei...