The BBC recently released its list of 100 novels that shaped our world, and I was mightily surprised to find The Twilight Saga on it, under the category of ‘Coming of Age’. Not because I am one of its detractors—far from it. But because it’s been panned and run down with such fierce intensity and regularity that one becomes shy even of admitting that one may hold some sort of affinity for the book and its characters!

Not that I am the sort of person who’d ever be ashamed of or embarrassed by the choices I make. In fact the protagonist in my own debut book mentions Twilight at one point as well. But when the BBC endorses this as a book that shaped our world, one can’t help feeling validated.

I read the first book in The Twilight Saga exactly 10 years ago— 2009— at the age of 22. Until that time, the authors I’d read included names such as these: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pearl S Buck, Jane Austen, Arundhati Roy, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Hardy. I had read about 3 Mills & Boons romances before I gave up on them. So I wasn’t remotely interested in Twilight, but my best friend had mentioned it several times in conversation, and I thought of buying the book for her as a gift.

At that time I was a sub-editor in the newspaper Financial Chronicle, my first job. I used to take a quick walk everyday on a short break during office hours, and it was during one of these walks in the Green Park market that I picked up the book, for her. She and I were room-mates in a working women’s hostel in Central Delhi. My office hours were such that I got back only after 11 p.m., while she returned even later, around 1 a.m. (News desk timings, of course.) That meant that dinner everyday was usually around midnight for me. And every night, while I ate, I liked to read. Since I happened to have this book with me that day I casually flipped through the pages just to see what it was all about. I also had the strange habit of not reading the back cover before I read the book, because for some reason that seemed to take away from the delicious pleasure of not knowing anything about the book when I dived into it. A pleasure somewhat akin to walking into the mist on a mountainside. Or exploring uncharted waters.

So it was that I had absolutely no information about Twilight and its story before that moment. I had never watched a vampire movie all my life. I knew three things about Count Dracula: that he sucked human blood, transformed into a bat and lived in Transylvania. And I didn’t even know that Twilight was about vampires. I don’t know how I managed to be so entirely oblivious, but I did.

My fingers flipped carelessly through the pages, stopping on one at random.

“If I was too hasty… if for one second I wasn’t paying enough attention, I could reach out, meaning to touch your face, and crush your skull by mistake…” read the line.

That stopped me right in my tracks. Who’s this man lying next to the girl he loves, but would crush the girl’s skull just by carelessly putting his hand on it? I was intrigued.

Flipped backwards to the first page.  Entered the wet, green, rainy town of Forks.

The rest, as they say, is history.

I read the book all the way from midnight until morning and refused to hand it to my friend for whom I had originally bought it.

I had fallen in love. And oh, what a falling there was.

There was something about this book that curved and wrapped itself slowly round me like a predatory creeper from a horror flick. Purposeful. Refusing to let go. And I was quite the willing prisoner.

Edward Cullen.

He was the very picture of 22-year-old romantic dreams come to life. He was, in one word, the ‘good boy-bad boy’.

The boy who was wreathed in mystery, with a whiff of thrill and danger about him, achingly seductive, intellectually superior, and heartbreakingly handsome. And yet, for all these traits, he was the chivalrous sort of hero, with an old-world air around him. Conflicted and deeply flawed, but always wanting to do the right thing.

And—he watched her sleep. Sigh.

Later, I found out that most people considered this distasteful, equating him with a Peeping Tom.

And I asked myself, why did I not feel outraged at the apparent ‘stalking’? The answer was plain as day. Right from the beginning of the story we, the readers, were made aware of Bella’s obsession with Edward, of her feelings for him. We knew that she had fallen in love with him, and therefore we knew of her consent. We knew that she would like him to be in her room. And that, to my mind, made all the difference. As for Edward, the first night he watched her, he heard her say his name in her sleep. And that is when he knew.

She was dreaming of him.

And so was I.

My obsession with Edward was such that the entire office came to know of it. I decorated my cubicle with a Twilight calendar and poster that I especially asked my cousin to bring for me from the US. Hunted out the movie version and played songs from the movie all day during office hours. It’s a wonder I got any work done. People would enquire politely and mischievously about Edward as if he and I were actually going steady (honest to God!). And at night, as soon as the time came for me to go to the hostel, back to Edward, I would get butterflies in my stomach, pretty much the way that one anticipates meeting an actual lover. I would go to my room and read the book over and over again – all the passages that I loved. I would leave the window open and in the dim light of the lamp I would imagine Edward standing by it, watching me read.

(Talk about romancing my own imagination!)

And then I bought New Moon. In the entire series, that’s the book I least liked –because Edward was missing for more than half the book. I probably finished the book too fast, just waiting for Edward to return (no, I don’t turn to the last page to see what happened. I never do that.) But by and by I also found myself getting angry at Edward. For leaving Bella unilaterally, ostensibly to ‘protect’ her. Didn’t she have a say in this, in things done ‘for her own good’? And then Alice coming to Bella after all this time, just because Bella apparently seems to be committing suicide. How did it even matter to all of them when they just upped and left her?

And yet… when he returned… oh, when he returned. He was forgiven everything just for returning. Edward Cullen was back. That was enough.

But now the equation was complicated. There was Jacob in the picture as well. And I found myself getting increasingly irritated at Edward’s over protectiveness. He was the one who left her. So obviously he had to deal with the consequences. But there he was— getting ever more controlling by the day and restricting her, telling her what was right for her. I never identified much with Bella but I liked how she defied him and did her own thing in Eclipse. Good for her!

But I think Edward pretty much redeemed himself in the tent scene, where he sat in a corner watching Jacob hold Bella in his arms. Just so he could save her from dying of frostbite. That one act compensated for all his past transgressions, so to speak.

The last book in the series made me hopping mad at Edward though. How he refused to make love to her just because he felt that he was hurting her and injuring her. The fact the she felt differently meant nothing. The fact that she wanted it meant nothing. Only what he considered right was right. The pattern of denial and withholding was maddening. Utterly, utterly maddening and exasperating. What sort of damaged man was this?

But what came next in the book felt like an even greater betrayal. Bella was suddenly all about being pregnant and having a baby. That I just couldn’t understand. After all this time, after wanting nothing more than Edward, now suddenly she was willing to die just to have a baby! Why, oh why! What was the point of anything then, what was the point of risking everything to marry this man when you would give up your life just to have a baby? Since when did that become important to her? I felt deeply betrayed by Bella.

However, as the story progressed and Bella changed into a vampire, she found the place where she felt completely herself, the place where she felt she belonged. She found her own special strengths and abilities, the power of throwing out the protective shield from herself, the shield which could fight the powers of the strongest vampires. In the end, it is Bella who saves the day. (For that, I suppose, I could overlook the ‘wanting the baby to death’ part.)

In hindsight though, it is never the last three books that I remember. Always the first book. Always Twilight. Always that feeling of discovering Edward for the first time, always that feeling of staying up all night re-reading the book, and listening to Full Moon Night a hundred times on a loop.

I also hunted out Midnight Sun from Stephenie Meyer’s website, and what a treat it was to read everything from Edward’s perspective! To look into the mind of the conflicted, dangerous, and deeply devoted man. The man who appeared too good to be true and yet, when you looked into his mind, there were so many feelings of insufficiency and self doubt. The sweetest, most endearing part of Midnight Sun was knowing how elated and unbelievably lucky Edward felt every time Bella said ‘yes’ to him (when all this time she was the one thinking of him as out of her league). How he imagined that someday she would say ‘yes’ to a normal human male — why would she want a monster like him anyway? And then his indescribable elation every time she said ‘yes’ to him. That emotion, that joy of being accepted by the woman he loved, was unforgettable – because it let me peek into the mind of a man deeply in love. It was beautiful.

Edward Cullen became my reference for the unbelievable, the impossible man. Not perfect. But unspeakably irresistible. And maddeningly flawed.

And for that alone, The Twilight Saga has an undeniable place in my life.

It’s funny though, that BBC placed it under the coming-of-age category, because for me it is the age-defying staple of my life. The book that makes me a young adult again, or perhaps more appropriately, a teenager. It’s comfort food for my teenage soul. Like piping hot tomato soup. A bowl of mushy cornflakes with warm milk. A plateful of steaming Maggi. Never gets boring, never gets old. And you never outgrow it.

Don’t we all have that one sustaining, everlasting obsession? Perhaps not all of us. But those of us who subsist on our own imaginations – we do. Oh, we do.