Across and Down Memory Lane

From the desk of Vitasta Raina

Time: Irrelevant

This post is about crossword puzzles. There is something so satisfying when you solve a well-formed crossword. It warms your very soul. You know they have this new trend, where you have to use a series of images that depict your aesthetic (forgive me blog-readers, I am an old millennial, I don’t speak Gen Z fluently!). Anyway, two images that would always be a part of my aesthetic: “a cup of black coffee” and a “crossword”.

I started solving or rather attempting to solve crosswords around age 13 or 14. My father, like me, is a cruciverbalist. And watching him, sitting in the morning with his chai and breakfast, leaning over the crossword while he ate, is I suppose a formative memory for me. And it still is. My father, now in his 70s, can still be found on the breakfast table with the crossword. So, I picked up the hobby but it did not come without its growing pains.

These crosswords were hard for a young teen who grew up in India. Some clues about a baseball legend that an American might know, or some vague movie star from the 1940s! How could I with my tiny monkey brain ever solve this conundrum?! So I did what any determined teenager would do. I started taking notes. I would sit and pore over the previous day’s solved crossword, and look up the answers in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. The crossword is the reason I know what Jai Alai is, or who June honorees are!

I remember spending time in my grandma’s house in Karol Bagh. I used to sit in my granduncle’s room, with the crossword and a pencil and use his thesaurus to solve the crossword. (Remember children all this was before mobile phones and the internet!) At one point of time, I decided to attempt making my own crosswords, a challenge I attempted and promptly gave up, but not before a very simple crossword I created got printed in my school magazine thanks to my then English language teacher.

Then came young adulthood. And I found something amazing. The Sunday Times Cryptic Crossword. My tiny mind was blown. I’ll never forget the first clue I solved- “Silver Article for a Turkish Ruler”! (Try to solve this readers, I promise you it will be worth it!”

For the past 5 or 6 years, somehow I drifted away the crossword. Life happened I suppose, but recently, maybe about a month or two ago, I have restarted solving the crossword during my morning commute to work. And it has been quite a rewarding experience. I still need to look up words, I still need to refer to the dictionary at times. And I still get to learn something new every day. I admit, I subscribe to the Times of India, not because of their journalistic integrity, but because of the Bombay Times, because that’s where the crossword is.

As Lou Reed once said “It’s my wife, and it’s my life!” I'd like to think he was talking about crosswords :-)

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Morning Routine 🖊