After all this time…

Fast forward to now and you’ll see a rather twitchy 26-year-old, typing away in an attempt to enunciate just how wrong she had been. For many, Harry Potter was mere entertainment. For others, he was magic. In my case, somewhere along the transition from Prisoner of Azkaban to Goblet of Fire, Harry and I established a friendship that trumped everything else. His stories began taking up hours of my time, spent crouched on the bathroom floor, pretending to have an upset stomach just so I could enjoy some quality, undisturbed reading time. I was hooked, and have been since then. Call it silly, but I am still in denial that Hogwarts is fictional and have assumed that the owl carrying my letter of acceptance has been intercepted, somewhere.

Now, I cannot praise J K Rowling’s genius any more than the world already has, nor could I possibly say anything that hasn’t been said about Harry Potter already. What I can do is try and assuage the sceptic in you and say that the ongoing hype for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has been a long time coming.

Picking up 19 years after the concluding scenes of Deathly Hallows, Cursed Child is a play written by Rowling in conjunction with Jack Thorne and John Tiffany which is being performed at London’s West End. It sees the celebrated boy wizard as an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic and father of three, struggling to come to terms with his past.

Although Cursed Child doesn’t even get to enjoy the luxury of being a complete book – let alone a 700-page doorstopper like its predecessors – it marks a return to the best form of escapism I have known. It provides much-needed respite – albeit temporarily – from the work-from-home-and-home-from-work life. I wish I could wingardium leviosa myself out of, so that I may reconnect with my long lost friend. It’s what nearly 20 years and seven books have been leading up to – the pinnacle of everything Harry Potter. And for Potterheads as a whole, it’s momentous for we get to dabble into Harry’s future and determine if good really did prevail over evil. Were all of Harry’s childhood troubles worthwhile? Or did Voldemort somehow manage to ruin life post Hogwarts too?

Published in The Express Tribune, August 18^th, 2016.