A 'READ' TO REMEMBER ....

The rainy weather and my particular state of boredom was highly conductive to reading. Pushed by the need to evade the idle tag rather than the thirst to feast my eyes on a book, i trudged along to a second hand book shop with a friend of mine. There were a whole bunch of stalls and each of the stall keepers were wooing us hard. We stepped into quite a few of them only to stage a stealth escape after hearing the prices of the secomd hand books piled up. This job was becoming increasingly difficult owing to the fact that my friend who was not quite an expert in such matters proved to be hindrance to my haggling with the owners over the price.

Unsuccessful at each stop we moved on. Some of them called us back with promises of settling on a better deal which didn’t work out either ,particularly because of my impatient friend. I still pulled him along to the next shop which was by far the biggest of the lot. They had a separate section for novels to where i hastily moved. A big pile of Robin Cooks, Michael Crichtons, Sidney Sheldons were stacked up. There were quite alot of them. I was rummaging through some John Grisham’s novels and i moved into de stall. Its then i saw that all too familiar face! A blond haired freckle faced guy smiling up at me from the cover of a book deep in that pile. He was flanked by two cute girls( one a dark haired one and the other a blonde one). In the backdrop was a guy wearing a ridiculous crown and swallowing a burger. ARCHIES COMICS! Suddenly i was transported to the world of the funny ARCHIE, his sweethearts VERONICA(the dark haired one) and BETTY(the blond one) and his crazy weird and nerdy friend JUGHEAD who loved to eat!

It was like going back down the memory lane for me. I found myself 12 years younger sitting in my room with an ARCHIE’s double digest in my hands. It was the days of the much dreaded history and geography textbooks which albeit a large book had the added advantage of acting a cover for my comics. I used to hide my ARCHIE’s comics inside the book and sit up reading for hours at the same time earning the sympathy and admiration of my parents. This became common with me trying out all the tricks to not get caught. The times when i was not so lucky turned out to be nightmares with parents confiscating the ‘vulgar’ comic books and me ending up getting yelled at.

Coming back to good old ARCHIES, it was a whole new world for me. Archie and his 2 lovers and their antics were always hilarious. Now as i wonder i am nothing short of surprised as to how he managed both of them when it was so tough to get hold of a good one here in my case. Betty the blonde sweet girl was my favourite out of the two and i kind of wished she ended up with Archie . Veronica who was the rich and spoilt girl added to the glam quotient. Jughead with his sinister ideas and antics were always worth a laugh and so was his stalker ‘Big Ethel’. Those were the carefree teenage days when having a girlfriend was like getting a a trip to moon and that is studied in a boys only school didn’t help either. Archie’s world was kind of a heaven to me, somewhere i could find solace .

Then there was Veronica’s millionaire dad Mr. Hiram Lodge who dreads meeting Archie for he was always clumsy and caused Mr.Hiram nothing but trouble.There was Archie’s rival Reggie who was after Veronica too. Further comedy was amply provide by the hefty Moose and his girlfriend Midge. The whole comic series was an awesome time killer and i used to get hooked up with it for hours at long.

So much for my thoughts. I pulled up the torn and old comic out of the heap. I bought it for the first price he asked without arguing. I then dragged myself back home .. all ready for a journey through the past yet again..reminding me of a master card commercial.. 'there are some things that money cant buy'!!