My earliest reading memory
Like many upper-caste households in north India, my family possessed clothbound copies of a Hindi translation of the Mahabharata. As a child, I read the volumes cover to cover, lingering over the sketches of the protagonists, and I then reread them – I can’t remember how many times. This first experience of imaginative literature, I now recognise, was also the most crucial.
My favourite book growing up
I wish I still possessed the collections of Russian and Ukrainian folktales that my parents bought from bookshops subsidised by the Soviet Union. The Soviets fought the cultural cold war in vast tracts of Asia, Africa and Latin America by attractively showcasing the range and abundance of Russian literature, and making it cheaply available. I spent much of my early years dipping into volumes of fairytales printed in Moscow, and then reading, in my teens, translations into English and Hindi of the great Russian writers – Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Bunin.
