Like every great love story, my fling with HP has its villain and in this case it is none other than every nakaam ashiq’s favourite punching bag: time.
AMORTENTIA
Like every great love story, my fling with HP has its villain and in this case it is none other than every nakaam ashiq’s favourite punching bag: time. It has played a vital role in my conflicted relationship with Harry Potter. I’ve had my shares of Wingardium Leviosas going wrong, Hogwarts Express being missed but time has also come in between the magical world and I like the wall Donald Trump intends to build on his country’s border with Mexico.
When a fellow Potterhead asks me if I’m “one of them” I usually respond with a nod in the affirmative. Secretly though, I am a little confused whether 20 years after Harry first entered our collective lives, am I still the Harry Potter fanatic I once was? My confusions are not without merit, either. For a regular Potterhead, the initial reaction to news of the 20th anniversary should be of excitement mixed with longing. An emotion that evokes awe and melancholy should erupt inside them. But my reaction was not of excitement; rather it was of an emptiness that crawled inside my stomach, signalling a loss I was not consciously aware I had endured.
When the franchise came to a final end with the release of Deathly Hallows (Part II) in 2011, I was heartbroken. I wanted to say goodbye to the world that had given me so much in as little emotional hoopla as was possible. I did not want to write long passages on Facebook about it, as some of my friends did. I wanted to let go quietly but of course things didn’t go according to plan. I ended up distancing myself from the universe of Quidditch tournaments and Butterbeer more brashly than I had intended to. I’d withdrawn from the world of magic with an indifference that now, to my revulsion, reminds me of the Dursleys. It was as if I had never heard of Platform 9 3/4 before in my life.
Keeping this in mind, I suppose I am now in fact what they call a (oh, the horror) “lapsed” Potterhead. The kind of disloyal fan that no one and I mean NO ONE likes. But does this mean that the 20th anniversary doesn’t mean anything to me? Well, not really. Sure. I had a rough start warming up to it, but in the end I still love Potter’s world nonetheless. The series means different things for different people. Some love it because they grew up with the characters. Others love it because it introduced them to a completely different universe. Most of us though, love it for the memories.
My first interaction with the series came in the form of celluloid - and initially (surprise, surprise) I was not impressed. I was way too young back then, and the story of a young boy trotting in a magical world in foul looking dark robes was not my ideal picture of a “children’s movie”. For the next three years, I’d stick to watching Disney productions and Barbie adaptations of fairy tales (don’t judge, please). After having spent good eight or nine years on this planet, I got into an ugly fight with my (then) best friend and finally realised how dismal a place this world really was. And so in my search of a newer, better place to live in, I gave Harry Potter another try. This time, my opinion of his world changed for the better. Having had a fresh fight with my supposed best friend, I resonated well with Harry’s sorry state in his aunt’s home. His sudden turn of fate on his eleventh birthday, also gave me hope. If he could find new friends, so could I!
To my dismay, my eleventh birthday arrived with no exciting news, and certainly no Hogwarts acceptance letter (the neurotic trust issues that I later developed in life are probably rooted in the disappointment caused by this incident). Instead, I was forced to pack my bags and move places. Sulkily, I left home and entered an age where a girl begins teetering on puberty’s fringes. And so Harry Potter disappeared from my life for a few years. I was not to completely fall in love with the series until I was in class 8th. One of my friends was a diehard Potterhead, and whether it was the fear of missing out or genuine interest I am not sure, but I ended up borrowing all her Potter books. By the time I’d finished them, I had fallen in love with Harry’s world again.
So much of what happens in the books we read is happening around us today in the world, but it is surprising that not many of us make the connection. Growing up in a Pakistan where the security situation kept going from bad to worse, and witnessing the world turning to ugliness and despair, reading Harry Potter became an act of finding hope. Snape taught me how you could never really know a person while Hermoine’s sassiness was something that I’d wanted to embody once I grew up. From Rowling’s story of getting rejected by dozens of publishers prior to getting rich and famous, to the Second Wizarding War which led to Voldermort’s ultimate defeat, everything taught me that things may not look bright at a given moment, but everything turns out well in the end.
I haven’t been able to follow the numerous spin-offs of the franchise. My copy of The Cursed Child lies unopened in my reader, and my Pottermore account hasn’t been logged into for so long that I suspect they’ve probably deleted it. Much of my intentional departure from the fandom has to do with this insane urge to recreate and relive the magic of HP, when the seven books (and eight movies) should be more than enough to keep it alive. In this sense I suppose I am not a lapsed Potterhead, after all.
One of my favourite quotes from the books comes from Dumbledore, wherein he says “Let us sleep. For in dreams we enter a world that’s entirely our own. Let us swim through the deepest ocean or glide over the highest cloud.” This neatly sums the Harry Potter experience. His world taught you to dream -and dream big. It gave you reasons to smile in a world that is constantly on the hunt to destroy them, and for me that is enough. Harry Potter is 20 years old now, in a few more years it’ll be 50 years old. And while the world will continue to sell ideas of spin-offs and fan-fictions, there will be a group of disgruntled old Potterheads like yours truly in quaint corners of the world, narrating the story of The Boy Who Lived to their grandkids, and telling them that if he could live on and change the world for the better, so can they.