Guwahati had its share of second-hand bookshops. There were four of them located near a cinema theatre called Anuradha, and I learnt of them sometime when I was in my last school year. Which also happened to be the Slog Year, the time when you are supposed to forget everything else and stick your nose so far up your textbooks that the smell of the pages never quite leaves you during your waking and non-waking moments. As you can easily figure out, it was not an auspicious time to learn about the availability of second-hand books. My first visit to those shops yielded a huge collection of Mad magazines from the seventies, Eric Van Lustbader’s The Ninja ( of which I had read a couple of rather….interesting pages from a friend’s father’s collection), and a couple of Sidney Sheldons. ( Oh, I loved Sidney Sheldon back then, especially the hot bits he managed to fit into his stories) All of them for a grand total of forty rupees and therefore cause for much rejoicing.

So from then on, I would latch onto any excuse to hang around near Anuradha cinema, which was about seven minutes by bus from our house. Mother wants a loaf of bread from the bakery? Birthday gift for cousin? Trip to a relative’s place? Off I would whiz to sniff around the four bookshops, looking for the new stuff they had, after which I would tend to the job I came there for in the first place.

And one fine day, I found a magazine.

Nothing so special about it, let me tell you. Just one more in a pile of other tattered and semi-tattered books and magazines, most of which were doomed to lie there, dusty and unbought till the end of time. Why did I even look at the magazine then, you ask? Because it had the letter ‘X’ in its name. For a 15-year old, any word with ‘x’ in it is the visual equivalent of a Siren’s song; you don’t let go until you have actually figured out the source, in the hope that there would be a nekkid chick or two singing it. The name of the magazine, in case you are wondering, was “Reflex”. It seemed like a music magazine, but when I opened it, at a random page, there were a couple of music listings – a couple of music reviews, an article on Dub music, whatever that was – and, strangely enough, a couple of articles on comics. Comics I hadn’t heard about till then. A brief writeup on some character called Madman, whom the reviewers called The Best New Character of the Year. Some interview with a fellow named Gaiman about some guy who committed suicide after reading some issue of some comic of his. Interesting, I thought. And promptly left the magazine back in the pile and ran home, because it was already late and I had spent about half an hour more than I was supposed to.

I still wonder why I didn’t buy it then, the first time. Maybe because at that time, five rupees was a lot of money for me – you could get a PG Wodehouse at the same place for ten to fifteen rupees, and a DC comic at a regular store for the same price, and paying half of that for a magazine, on a whim, was too much for this penniless student. So yeah, that was that.

It’s easy to guess what happened next. Every six or seven minutes, I would pause in the middle of my textbook-reading, and think – “Darn. I should have bought that magazine.” That classic beatzoic state-of-mind – if I would have bought the magazine, I would be pausing every six-seven minutes and think – “Darn, I shouldn’t have bought that magazine. What a waste of five rupees.”

Whatever. I went there the next day and bought it. Paid five whole rupees, too, because the guy there had seen me reading it the last day and knew that if I was there and asking him for it, it sure was good stuff.

Smuggled the magazine home ( parents would kill me if they found I was corrupting my mind with non-textbook matter during the Slog Year), and spent the afternoon reading it. Turned out it was a pretty good thing I bought it. This Gaiman guy seemed really interesting, he wore black t-shirts throughout the year, which seemed really cool to me, and he also wrote this comic called The Sandman which drove people to commit suicide. He also knew Alan Moore, it seemed. ( How did I know Alan Moore at that time? Because I read all the blurbs and advertisements on all the comics I read, dummy – and this Moore fellow was an Eagle Award winner, which meant he was a pretty good writer) Then the magazine also had a five-page write-up on an artist called Dave McKean. I remember spending quite sometime trying to figure out whether the artwork on display were mangled photographs or not, because not a soul I knew could paint comics the way McKean seemed to.

Wait, the good stuff does not end there. The cover story in that issue was about an author named Philip K. Dick, and apart from the intriguing nature of his work, which the writer of the article could not stop raving about, there was also an excerpt from “A Scanner Darkly”, which I could not figure out at all. I really didn’t understand a thing of what Philip K Dick wrote, and I must say I was mighty ashamed. Also quite a bit of stuff on music and bands I had never heard of, and was never interested in the first place.

Then there were the ads. About comics called Zap, drawn by a man named Crumb. And with mighty shocking cover images at that. Of a new Dark Horse comic called The Mask. A single page comic strip by a guy named Matt Howarth. All in all, this was value for money, I was sure. Five rupees well-spent.

The only problem, of course, was that there were no more issues of Reflex to be found anywhere.

I tried. Oh, I tried very hard. Any magazine store that had its share of old or new foreign magazines, I would ask about Reflex. Uncles going abroad, I would ask them to find copies of Reflex. Any new city, with its share of bookstalls, I would keep an eye open for the familiar logo. When I learnt the secrets of the internet the first time in my life, and what a search engine was – the third word I searched for was “Reflex magazine” ( the first was “Batman”, and the second was “Spice Girls naked”, before you ask.) But no, no mention of this magazine anywhere, except for a couple of interview mentions on fansites of different musicians.

But on the way, I also searched for the dope on Neil Gaiman, and Sandman, read some of Gaiman and McKean, quite a bit of Philip K Dick, managing to understand his writing this time; learnt more about Robert Crumb and read some of his stuff too, and about Michael Allred, the guy who created the Madman comics. Also came to know that the two guys who wrote that review were named Evan Dorkin and Kyle Baker, both of whom have created some incredible comic books.

Would any of my (ahem) tastes be different had I not bought that issue of Reflex? Alas, I know not. And who cares anyway? “You do, beatzo”, the masses respond. “Why else would you chew up my friends’ page this way?” Hmm, maybe you’re right. I certainly worry about time-travellers in the future going back and buying that issue of Reflex before I did, thereby contributing to my stunted intellectual growth and much ignorance later on in life. ( You realise I have begun blabbering, don’t you?)

Post-script: Early this year, tired of searching eBay for non-existent back-issues of ‘Reflex’, I called on divine help. Namely, mikester, who proving my point about great minds that read alike, mentioned that he had a collection of back-issues that he might off-load. As a result, two months later, a package of 10 Reflex magazines arrived at the front desk of the office, beautifully packed in the Mighty Mike Sterling Manner. Life, I swear, never seemed so good. Does the term “full-circle” make any sense to you?