Good things never last, do they? My idyll days came to an end when my father married again. Not many children get to attend their father’s wedding. I was one of the privileged few. I remember I was wearing a light blue buttersilk gown and so were my sisters (my sisters were under the care of my own paternal granny). I found that if you spun round fast and then sat down suddenly the gown fluffed round you like blue froth. I taught my sisters how to do it and all three of us were perfecting this skill in one corner of the marriage hall while my father tied the auspicious knot. My stepmother was no different from the average woman (that she has changed and mellowed over the years is a different story). I was packed off to Singapore to our parents after their marriage. They lived in a two-room flat that left me suffocating after the vast expanses of space in my earlier life.  Books became my sole companions. More than ever I began retreating into my own small(?) world of books. But I could never find the time to read them. My mother and now my father too were against the reading of storybooks. It always had to be my schoolbooks or my homework and lights had to be put off by nine. I despaired. But necessity is the mother of invention. I found that the moonlight that streamed into the room was quite enough to read. (Probably that is one reason why I had to start wearing specs at the age of twelve.) And so my clandestine affair with books continued. My school library was a treasure-house that spewed and churned books of all kinds. This was the period when I set my sight on distant realms other than Enid Blyton and Hans Andersen. I read everything that came my way, classics, trash et al. But soon I became a discerning reader and the rendezvous continued until I was packed off again, this time to India, to my granny. I was stashed away in a boarding school. But luckily for me it happened to be a convent run by nuns, headed by an American nun. So they had funds aplenty and the school was well run with all the necessary facilities and of course all the books one would want to read. This was where I got myself introduced to the real unabridged Dickens, George Eliot, William MakepeaceThackeray, Maugham and the rest. This was also where I got to read books in my vernacular. My grandfather had taught me the Tamil alphabets and I had read primers but never the real thing until I reached India. Saandilyan, Kalki, Jaavar Seetharaman, Mu Va., Puthumai Pitthan, Devan, Bharathi, Barathidasan………..oooh the list is endless.