The first novel I read

I was in primary four when I read my first novel.

My dad had this collection of books, kept in a three tier shelve, that we were forbidden to touch or allow our multitude of uncles, aunties and other kin take away, under pain of sever flogging (yes, my father didn’t spare the rod, that’s why I turned out so well bred – I hope).

My and I brothers used to look at those books with awe, pondering what made them so special, wondering if we will ever get to read them.

There were times that the urge to know what made the books so special got too much to bear, times we gave in to that compulsion and standing on a kitchen stool we would take them down one at a time and look at the covers paying special attention to those that had pictures in them.

It was this same compulsion that led to my punishment. As usual I and my brothers had visited the out-of-bounds shelve to look at the books. Everything had gone according to plan until I began reading the notes attached to the pictures and got too engrossed that I did not hear when my father walked in.

I had thought the world would fall down on me when I looked up after a shadow crossed the page I was reading to see him looming over me. He had looked at me for a spell, and then when I had expected his usual ‘my friend what do you think you are doing?’ he had asked for his food which I quickly ran to get.

I was sitting quietly outside, awaiting his wrath, when his booming voice called me back into the sitting room to clear the plate. As I turned to carry the plates away he asked me to hold on.

“My friend, take that book,” he said, pointing to a book lying face down on the table. “That one you were reading is too advanced for you. Read this one but you must tell the story when you finish.”

My heart went flip flop. I had expected the worst. But there was I, with permission to touch one of the sacred texts. I began reading in earnest almost immediately, not that I was overly eager to read the book but on account of the instruction to retell the story afterwards – the punishment for touching the sacred books. At first I found some words strange, but an older cousin soon taught me how to write the difficult words down and check them later in our little oxford dictionary.

Before I knew it, I was caught up in a world of love, money and cars, all of which I knew only little about, in a world I wanted so much to visit. That first book changed my life, gave me an escape from the taunts that usually followed me whenever I went to where other kids played football – I was that kid with a bad leg that everyone laughed at.

That was the beginning of my incursion into books and the world of make believe. Before I left primary school I had read everything in the forbidden bookshelf and by JSS 1, I could tell that James Hadley Chase was a fictional character. Yeah, I already could tell style then.

I was in primary four when I read my first novel. It was a Pacesetters book written by Muhammed Sule. ‘Undesirable element’.