Reminiscing the Days of Yore
The seventeen-year-old me was enticed by the grit of the vain, Scarlett O’Hara, and mesmerized by that tall, dark and handsome, Rhett Butler. How deep and lasting were these impressions, the countless future encounters of infatuation with older men (in the reel and real lives) attested to this juvenile affinity with the idea of love.
On my recent visit to our city’s lone bookstore, my eyes fell on my first romance with life that had clearly swept me off my feet. I remember it was my refuge and respite, and the first foray into the historical fiction of the plantations of the South, of the Yankees, of the federations, and of the American Civil War.
My old copy must have been somewhere in my mother’s attic. I have got a newer, shinier copy now from #JarirBookStore, which doesn’t have that sepia charm of the relic that I had by my bedside for many many years.
I have placed this newer, shinier copy on my living room’s shelf. It may entice my daughter to have a taste of a chivalrous romance — — of Tara, of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. But this Generation Z may give more answers than ask questions about the unearned privilege of the people born with a pale shade of skin. The anticipation of my brood’s falling in love with the idea of love may have died a premature death already.
Grown I have much after my falling head over heels for Rhett Butler. The book has been called ‘a thousand-page love letter to racism’. If I had read it as this version of me, I might have lambasted that MCP, Butler to no end. Nevertheless, every time I look back at what joy the revisiting of my rustic first copy of GWTW used to bring, I giggle and smile unbeknownst to all who are around. There has been no other work of fiction that could entice me thus until now. Perhaps because you are seventeen only once, that too, in the pre-9/11 times, you are incognizant of your conditioning of the colonial hangover.
But to keep me alive, whenever life said, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” ,I have always slept over it while saying, “ O, I cannot think about it now. I go crazy if I do. I will think about it tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day”
On a separate note, I do hope Scarlett could bring that (MCP) Rhett Butler back.
After all, tomorrow IS another day!
