Ode to Love – Confessions of a Book-Fiend

In the beginning it was a refuge from the world outside; a world that began where home ended. Playmates made fun of your clumsy attempts at games; you couldn’t dodge the opponents as they ran after you, you couldn’t throw the ball straight, neither hit it hard, you couldn’t outshout mates in the wild horseplay, nor pull them down in the mock show of strength. Your face turned crimson on hearing lewd invectives being bandied with abandon and you would cower in shame. But you could effortlessly finish the homework in the class itself. You could not help but answer the teacher's queries when the whole class was mum – they were so unimaginatively inane. You were mocked again for your thoroughness with academics. 

Books brought an escape from this reality. They took you to lands where this bullying didn’t exist. You met kids like you, who shunned the clumsy ways of the world. In stories you found friends you had always yearned for. Books taught you to dream. They widened your imagination and nurtured it with tenderness. Library hour was the best time in school. 

Over the years, dalliance with books transformed into obsession. You read two-penny potboilers, you read the lurid tear-jerkers, you read the macabre tales of illicit love and murder in the shady magazines. Soon, unbeknownst to you, you were reading classics in Hindi and English. When you discovered poetry, first in Hindi and then in Urdu, it was like meeting your destiny. You knew, you had to come to its shores. As your inner world swelled, the need for companions in the outer world shrank.

You were growing. Much vicissitudes of the human condition, a lot of all men, lay ahead. There came a time when insuperable melancholy filled the days and the nights. Each dawn unfolded the interminable tedium of a day. Each dusk announced the sleepless moments of the night to follow. There was no succour in the mundane activities of daily living. Every company was unbearable. Attempts of some to dispel the ennui only aggravated it. There was no hopelessness, no anxiety about the future. Sorrow had passed. In its wake was a paralysing indifference to life. You wanted to get on with living desperately but felt like a fledgling who has yet not learned flying. 

Books provided gentle support, silently and unostentatiously. They were the much-needed companion who eschewed gratuitous advice. For hours every day, you escaped the stupefying lethargy of life and entered a new world. You discovered that you were still capable of feeling sadness, elation, laughter, longings, curiosity and eagerness; The eternal poetry of life. There was no moralising, no promises of a vibrant future, no calls to forsake the gloom. Just a clear picture of life in its various moods. You realised, perhaps then, that the present dullness was just a shade of life and will pass like everything else that had.

It did and in no time.

Shock of unthinkable destiny, as it befell life unannounced, had anaesthetised the mind, benumbed grief. When mind recovered, it felt the changes past events had ushered. It grieved. Books whispered a soft melody in your ears. You discovered a new elegance in poetry, its breath-taking ability to mirror emotions in their vast spread. All with a spellbinding brevity. These books gave words to your feelings and ironically enriched life; celebration of grief, in a language discovered anew.

Happiness docked at the shores of life once again and brought peace along. In the serenity of newfound pleasures, you remembered the dark days of the past and feared the transience of existing contentment. Queries that had flitted across your mind randomly in the past, now became persistent. Why life? Why joy? Why sorrow? Why the universe? Why the world? You courted your one love of life more ardently. Thus dawned another phase of enchantment with books. They became a necessity; not only life-enhancing but life-giving. You read entranced. You read possessed; possessed of a love. A love that demands nothing, only proffers joys.

You have been in the embrace of this passion for decades now. Books have answered, with elan and unbelievable ease, queries that seemed inscrutable a few years back. They have brought a quiet in life which is born of acceptance of your self, with its numerous failings and little virtues. They have shown you the place of men in the world. They have offered you a suggestion as to why you are the way you are. Unpretentiously, they venture to answer the imponderable query; What is the meaning in it all, this universe and this life? In the exuberant company of this forever youthful friend, every day brings newer discoveries, newer freedoms; freedom from ignorance, from the shackles of hidden dogmas stifling life. Freedom to look at the world square in the face and enjoy it warts and all.