Happy birthday, Matilda!

“Nineteen times 78?”

“Ummm... 1,482!”

“Well done, my dear. Now, how much is 17 times 91?”

I got that right too. And I had to just pat myself in the back — because there was no one around to do it. This mental math challenge was purely “mental”, with just one person doing both the questions and the answers. The rest of the world — I mean my little world — was busy mourning my pathetic knowledge of variable equations and theorems. So I just had to do what I had to do: Devise a quiz show in which all the laurels were mine. I played this programme in the privacy of a minuscule garden in my ancestral home, with a hundred bloodthirsty mosquitoes and fat caterpillars as a faithful audience. My knowledge of the multiplication tables, however, was not fiction. I still get them right but Matilda did them best.

“…If a little pocket calculator can do it why shouldn’t I?” Author Roald Dahl’s Matilda Wormwood was only five and a half (in a book that marks its 30th anniversary on October 1, 2018) when she said that to Miss Jennifer Honey, her first teacher in school. The mild-mannered Miss Honey, in stark contrast to the headmistress Miss Trunchbull (“a gigantic holy terror” who “marched like a storm-trooper”), encouraged her new pupil to recite more tables. And when she was convinced that the child was a genius, she was further impressed by the latter’s penchant for poetry. Penchant for creating poetry, not just reading it. The subject of Matilda’s first limerick in school was Miss Honey herself:

‘The thing we all ask about Jenny

Is, “Surely there cannot be many

Young girls in the place

With so lovely a face?”

The answer to that is, “Not any!” ’

These lines turned Miss Honey’s “pale and pleasant face” a “brilliant scarlet”, other than of course warming the cockles of many a heart that read the book. But Matilda was not meant to be a warmer of any kind. Her above-average intelligence made her painfully aware of her surroundings — being an unwanted, neglected child in a family of four — apart from helping her plan little acts of revenge on bullies (her father, for example, an uncouth businessman who thought her no more than a piece of furniture). These acts of revenge were not the result of ego clashes. Matilda simply knew how to stand up for herself.

Burying her face in the books at the public library — under the loving gaze of Mrs Phelps, the librarian — Matilda travelled the world while sitting in her room in an English village. And the widening of the horizons of her mind brought on the realisation that her family, one that loved mooching around a television set over cold fish-and-chips or meat stew with mashed peas, would do nothing to nurture her dreams. The loneliness of Matilda, the child-genius who also has a musical and a film to her name, may bring a lump in your throat. But please don’t let that lump choke you if you really love Matilda. She doesn’t like to waste tears on anything, least of all on herself.

Matilda did rather well for herself, going by the vision of the book’s illustrator Sir Quentin Blake, now 85 years old. A friend of Dahl’s, Blake hasn’t forsaken the child he brought to life with his drawings 30 years ago.

To mark the book’s 30th birthday, Sir Quentin Blake has released eight new illustrations, showing Matilda as an astrophysicist among other things

To mark the book’s 30th birthday, Blake has released eight new illustrations, showing Matilda as an astrophysicist, a world traveller and as chief executive of the British Library among other things. It’s not hard to imagine her in any of these avatars. Her love for crunching numbers connects with a career in astrophysics. Wanderlust, both mental and physical, makes her the ideal globetrotter. And who better than a voracious learner to head the prestigious British Library in London? Three of these sketches are now the covers of special collectors’editions.

The spirited little girl’s popularity, according to a report in The Guardian last week, has only grown with her age. Since it was first published, Matilda has sold 17 million copies. The figures from the last two years are particularly high, making this one of Dahl’s highest-selling works.

MatildaRoald DahlPuffinFiction₹450

There are various theories for this spike in sales. Chief among them is that parents are finally choosing inspirational female literary characters for their offspring. But for many, Matilda is not an icon. She is someone you can share a laugh with (or at), learn a trick or two from (how to mess up someone’s hair with some colour, for instance) or just comfort when she is flung aside like a dirty doormat by uncaring parents and a selfish brother. At any age, she is one good companion to have.

Published on September 28, 2018