Dear Ms.
Mittal,
We are
pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at the Hogwarts School of
Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and
equipment.
Term begins on September 1. We await your owl no later than July 31.
Yours sincerely,
Minerva McGonagall,
Deputy Headmistress
I stared at
the words, clutching tightly on to the sheet of paper in my hands. I read the
letter over several times, fixating on the first few words. It’s not real. You know it’s not real, I
told myself over and over again. But even as I repeated the words, I couldn’t
help but feel a surge of excitement, and perhaps, a surge of hope. What if…?
No, it can’t be. But what if…? I bit my lips in an attempt to keep myself
from squealing out loud, not out of concern for my fellow passengers, but to
conceal this very important letter from everyone else. Of course, I didn’t
realize that at the same moment, my brother was sitting on another berth of the
train and reading a very similar letter addressed to him.
It’s been…maybe
13 years since this incident happened, since that 12-year-old version of me
found a little envelope tucked into my bag on the train to Bangalore. My family
and I had just spent a few days in Delhi with my cousin and her family, and
were making the customary 2-days-2-nights journey back home. I had just been
about to settle down with the fourth Harry Potter novel (having recently
discovered the series), when I saw the envelope containing two letters. The first
was, if I may take the liberty of calling it that, my Hogwarts acceptance
letter. It was a good thing I opened that one first. The second was a letter
from my cousin – a fellow Harry Potter enthusiast – explaining how she had always
wanted to receive such a letter ever since she started reading the books, and that
she thought my brother and I might have liked to get one too. I looked over at
the berth on the side, and saw my brother grinning away at a piece of paper in
his hands.
Now, those
who’ve never read or enjoyed reading the Harry Potter books may not truly
understand the significance of the moment. It’s
just a bunch of kids trying to make themselves a part of some fantastical
world. Well, yes, it is. But there’s a lot more to it than that. I know
every person who has enjoyed these books would have had his own reasons for
doing so. For me, I think the reasons had a lot to do with the idea of
extraordinary – magical – things being possible in the life of an ordinary kid.
And that’s what we all were. Ordinary kids. With ordinary problems. Stuck in an
ordinary world. And these books took us into a world that was narrated to us
from the point of view of a kid who was just as baffled and confused and scared
as any of us, and over time, as this other world become more familiar and
started to make sense, we fell in love with it. At least, I did.
And because
this was a world that was knowable only to wizards and witches, of course it
was entirely possible that it really did exist, and we muggles were just never
aware of it. So that letter, that acceptance letter, was not so much about
being told that you possessed magical powers (though that bit was cool too),
but more about receiving an invitation to officially enter into this world that
we loved, this time, not through someone else’s eyes, but our own.
I’m
rambling, I know. But these books have that effect on me. As someone who has
read all the books a countless number of times, jumped at the chance of answering
any and every Harry Potter quiz out there, written an entire philosophy term
paper based on these books, and proudly accepted the title of a Heek (Harry
Potter Geek), I [and maybe the people around me] have to accept occasional hazard
of being unable to stop talking about the books once I start.
But I’m not
sure why I’ve been itching to write about this incident in particular for a
while now. In all honesty, I’m quite sure I’d forgotten about it. Most likely,
so have my brother and the cousin who gave me this letter. But recently, I heard
someone say that it might be interesting to write something about the Harry
Potter books in a children’s magazine, and all I kept thinking was – what else
is there to be said that hasn’t been said already? And just like that, this
memory resurfaced. [Perhaps it was prodded by a recent conversation with my
brother on these books, or the fact that I recently travelled by train in India
after almost 12 years].
It’s a
memory that is simultaneously and bizarrely very personal and possibly far more
universal than I can fathom. I mean, who knows? Maybe I’m not the only person
to have dreamt of receiving the Hogwarts acceptance letter. And maybe I’m not
the only person who ever did.
:D
