Magic lives on.

Several times today I realized with a pang that it was all over. The spell has broken and the tale has ended. Around 2:30 this morning I finished reading the seventh Harry Potter book titled ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’. And the feeling that shadows one’s mind after one has finished reading something that one felt attached to is gripping my mind now and it is an intense feeling and multiplied by the fact that this is the last book of the series. It is a loneliness mixed with an inexplicable sense of melancholy that I often feel gazing at the inky-blue sky at dawn and a dusty red sky at twilight.
‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ happened to me in my 9th standard…the first book featuring Harry Potter that I read. Perhaps because I had never read anything like it before and it was my stepping stone to the world of magic, witchcraft and wizardry ,I prefer this book to any other in the series, whereas many of my friends swear by the third book ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’. By the time I finished the book I was so in love with Harry, Hermione and Dumbledore and so sorry about Cedric and so drawn into that black and white world Rowling conjured so perfectly with a flick of her ‘wand’, that it did not take me long to finish the first three and wait eagerly for the next three.
I liked to believe that I resembled Hermione…that illusion is long since broken. The characters were all so identifiable, so human yet magical, some so good and some so frighteningly bad which back then I believed was a realistic representation! I told mother I wanted to be a ‘witch’. She was scandalized …which was a pretty natural reaction considering she hadn’t read the books.
The writing standard, I felt, fell in the subsequent three massive volumes. I didn’t much like ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’ though I thought that the teenager Harry had been portrayed fairly realistically. ‘Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince’ failed to match my expectations and caused me a little despair. The compactness was somehow missing. Nevertheless I waited eagerly for the 7th book to release, believing all the while that Dumbledore wasn’t dead.
I wished with all my heart that none of Harry Hermione and Ron would die at the end of the 7th book, like his millions of fans throughout the world did. Finally when I laid my hands on the 7th book in an electronic format, already having discarded two fake versions, I wasn’t so sure it was Rowling’s writing. It indeed was Rowling’s. Slowly I got engrossed in the book and though at places it seemed rather contrived and made-to-fit-in
I liked the book. I liked the fact that finally there were shades of grey in some of the characters, most of whom were previously ‘innately good’ or ‘incurably bad’. I loved the hitherto misjudged Snape. I quite disliked the epilogue, which seemed rather ‘bollywood ishtyle’. At the risk of getting ‘Avada kedavada’ed by my sister, who belongs to the ‘Crazy about Harry, it’s him I’ll marry’ club and contrary to what I myself had wished for earlier, I would have liked Harry to have died, of course killing Lord Voldemort as well rather than have him pay that little trip to heaven/King’s Cross.
All said and done, I’d really miss waiting in eager anticipation for the huge volumes, scampering through the alleys and secret passages of Hogwarts,sipping the Butterbeer at Hogsmeade, the creepy ambience at the Forbidden forest, the defence against dark arts classes under Lupin and fake Mad-Eye Moody. Lord Voldemort too.And millions of other little things. But I’ll dream. And the magic will live on.