The World of My Books – My Many Histories

Each book in my library has a unique appeal.

I never walk across a book-shelf without stealing a glance at the spines of the stacked volumes. Often, I linger over them, when such a fancy seizes me and the moments of my life are not hemmed in by the demands of a workaday routine. Sometimes a chance remembrance brings a whiff of a scintillating experience I have had reading a book. I then head towards them with a zeal. I dive into my collection, one genre leads to another, a book of an author reminds me of his other works, glimpse of a book peeping from the rear prompts me to bring down the row in the front; I sit surrounded by mounds of books, pick one from the pile and live again the time I had spent with the book – years, perhaps decades, ago.

 

Words of the author breath life in to the inert pages of a book. This is the character a book is born with.

Each reader brings to a book, a world all his own, because no two individuals are alike. With every new reader book unfolds a new meaning, and acquires a new life.

I spend days, often weeks, with a book. In my company, book adds another facet to its persona; The place where I read the book, time of the day and the season of the year when I read it, my mood, sorrows, and joys that were a part of my life then, are forever imbued in the book’s personality. This is a singular experience that only I share with it.

 

The derelict station I was posted to soon after internship, beastly cold of a Delhi winter experienced after a decade in south, and my utter loneliness then, are embedded in my copy of William L Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of Third Reich. This was the first history of Second World War I read. It was riveting. After work I sat with the book in the small lawn facing my room, mild warmth of a fading day enhancing the joy of reading. Sudden chill in the air, when the last rays of sun disappeared behind the horizon, prompted me to go indoors.

Gulzar’s teleserial, Mirza Ghalib, had been aired on Doordarshan, a year before my first posting. I was bowled over by the serial: Jagjit Singh’s music, Nasiruddin Shah’s portrayal of Ghalib, and Ghalib’s poetry – though, only a miniscule selection was chosen for the biopic. I bought Ali Sardar Jafri-edited Ghalibnama, a collection of Ghalib’s complete Urdu verse. I read Ghalib after morning’s work at the clinic. I was quite alone even at work. A stray patient walked in occasionally. There were only a couple of male nurses, who had learnt to make themselves scarce in the station that had no need of them. My happiest memories of the run-down clinic are of reading Ghalib. I had not read such profound poetry before. I had no grasp of Urdu. The senior nurse, Salim, would willingly help me with difficult words. I marked the outstanding ghazals in the book. This copy sits on a shelf besides my reading chair. I pick it up often to drink of the poetry within and reminisce the days I came to know Ghalib – the forlorn station, the ramshackle clinic, and an ever-gnawing boredom.  

Ronald W. Clark’s biography of Einstein recalls the time I visited the small hospital on the banks of Hindon river for a short period. I remember the dark room in the mess where I stayed, perpetually under the shade of huge trees. It was difficult to put the book aside to dress up and climb down for meals in the dining room. It was the first biography of a scientist I read that was a page-turner.

Another biography of Einstein, which I began after a couple of years, is associated with some wretched memories. I was at a hospital in Chanakyapuri in Delhi where my father was admitted for the extraction of an artificial hip joint that had got infected, a few weeks after it was implanted. It was his fourth surgery in six weeks. Throughout the day, he lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I sat beside him with Walter Isaacson’s Einstein. I would read page after page without grasping a word. The wall-to-wall window across the bed framed the naked autumn trees standing mutely in the large grounds of the hospital. It was heart rending to hear and observe my stoic and utterly resigned father wince with muffled cries of pain as the physiotherapist tried to walk him on the limb that was now bereft of a hip joint. When the room oppressed me unbearably, I would drag myself to the cafeteria located in the garden. The same trees were visible here too. Ground was carpeted in fallen leaves. I drank coffee without opening the book. I was in the hospital for seven days. In a different time, I would have remembered this hospital for its beauty. I never finished the book and though it is a well-written, unbiased biography, I still have not gone back to it.

I had read many books of Somerset Maugham when I came to Pune for MD, but the first I came to possess was Razor’s Edge. I bought it at a book fair in the city. Like everything else in Pune then, when I compare it to the ostentatious Delhi that I came to witness later, exhibition was a spartan affair. In a modest-sized hall, barely larger than the drawing room of a luxury condominium, few tables were laid, covered with white sheets. Books were neatly arranged on them, flat not stacked. I readily detected the single copy of Razor’s Edge staring at me. I have read the book again a couple of times in the past decades. The book, themed on the Hindu philosophy of renunciation, always reminds me of the austere book-fair where I bought it.

I was consumed with greed when internet proffered an unlimited access to best books available in the country. Arrival of amazon.in literally lay the power to buy any book I wanted at my fingertips. I read frantically in those days. I soon realised that time I had left in this world was the only factor that would decide number of books I would leave unread. I set up a target of hundred pages a day and easily achieved this even as I enjoyed the book immensely. Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation, a sweeping contemporary history of Middle-East and Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi, a narrative history of India from around independence to early 2000s, both tomes of about eleven-hundred pages each, remind me of this fevered period in my reading life. Today, I cannot look at them without ruing my tardy reading now – I had finished both in 7-10 days each; but about two decades ago.

Bill Bryson’s Troublesome Words was the first book I read in its genre i.e., English language. Though the book is highly readable, and faultlessly lucid, and perhaps because it is such a splendid book, I could not bring myself to finish it in a few days. I read it for a few minutes every day as I sipped my morning cup of tea – the time of the day when mind is freshest and most receptive, and the joys imbibed linger for long. Knowing the spread of my ignorance was never so pleasurable.

I bought many English-usage books and style guides later. A few languorous moments that come my way – when I return from the ritual of cycling in the morning and sit down for tea – are spent with these books. Patricia T. O’Conner’s Woe Is I, Benjamin Dreyer’s Dreyer’s English, are among many that have brightened my mornings.

Another summer in Hindon is etched in my memory as the time I was introduced to the wonders of astronomy. My top-floor room burned like an oven. My family had not yet shifted to the new station and I had moved with only a suitcase and a carton of books in my car. I would continuously move the cooler, this way and that, without a whiff of cold air reaching me, as there was none in the moribund cooler. Brian Greene’s The Fabric of The Cosmos made the misery bearable. I was awestruck by Greene’s staggeringly simple explanations of the difficult astronomy conundrums. It was frightening to hover on the brink as a foggy understanding dawned on my dense ignorance about the mysteries of universe. I added another obsessive track to my bibliomania and bought many books on physics, each as engrossing as they were illuminating.

I discovered Steven Weinberg in this search. I read his classic book on the origin of universe, The First Three Minutes, in the army transit camp near Guwahati railway station. I was staying there overnight, to catch a flight home the next day. I remember the small cosy room and the innumerable cups of tea I ordered from the café as I read Weinberg’s incredibly eloquent description of the early universe. Now the book always reminds me of the heavily guarded guest house, soldiers in their combat uniforms waiting patiently in queue with heavy rucksacks slung on their shoulders, and the hubbub of traffic on the street outside the gate.

All travel books are not dull guides, or endlessly babbling, unimaginative travelogues; I realised this as I read my first travel book of Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There, an account of his travels in Europe. I read the book sprawled on a lawn chair in my garden, during a long vacation in winters. Side-splitting humour would make me roll in laughter every few minutes, threatening to bundle me off the chair. Looking up, I found amused neighbours watching the spectacle from their first-floor-balcony. Every time I look at the book, I am effortlessly transported to a sunny lawn, hedged by flower beds, on a crisp winter-day.

Richard Dawkins’ wonderful ode to the poetry of science, Unweaving the Rainbow, wraps around itself memories of a holiday in the Himalayan town of Dalhousie. I read the book, spellbound by Dawkins’ elegantly fluid prose, swathed in woollens, sitting beside an electric heater, as rain pattered the roof, and dripped from the eaves.

I remember reading a biography of the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Love and Revolution, during another holiday in the hills of Uttarakhand at Binsar forest sanctuary. A friend, a bibliobibuli nonpareil, had gifted it. I sat in the sunny courtyard of the beautiful resort, surrounded by tall oaks, and rhododendrons, and read amid endless cups of filter coffee supplied by the generous host.

A misfortune had rocked our placid lives about this time. It felt as if ground had moved from beneath our feet. The sense of utter helplessness and foreboding of an impending doom had passed, as everything in life – good or bad – invariably does, but we grieved at the devastation left in its wake.

Faiz, with Ghalib, sits on a bookshelf beside the chair where I read. One night, I casually picked up Saare Sukhan Hamare, collection of his complete poetry, and flipped its pages. I came across a small nazm, I had not noticed before, Khwab-Basera. It beautifully, and fittingly resonated with my emotions and feelings then. It felt my grief had found words. Since then, every time I look at Saare Sukhan Hamare on the shelf, ineffaceably beautiful words of Khwab-basera bubble up effortlessly in my memory: ‘इस वक़्त तो यूँ लगता है अब कुछ भी नहीं है, महताब न सूरज, न अँधेरा न सवेरा’.

The stifling, muggy hot months I spent in an Air Force Station in Assam, as I waited to secure voluntary retirement from service, remind me of many books. I read under a fan that evenly spread the sweltering heavy air in the room. Every time I rummage through my Dawkins collection, The Greatest Show on Earth, a big book that majestically presents extant evidence for evolution, reminds me of my last days in Air Force: my bare room in the mess, a few books stacked on the writing table beside the small electric kettle for coffee, long walks in dusk on a narrow road that hugged the airfield, anxiety about a new work environment in private hospitals, and deepening nostalgia for the life I was quitting after nearly three decades in service.

My copy of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow is imprinted with vivid pictures of: IGI airport, where I bought the book; It’s VIP lounge – courtesy a government-sponsored trip to UK, that saw us upgraded to business class; my irrepressible excitement, for this was my first visit to Europe; the persistent entreaties of the flight attendants for wine, beer, snacks, and many-course meals; my jaw-dropping wonder as I walked the central London streets strewn with massive, daunting, imperial architecture; my amazement as I looked at Raphael, Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, at London’s humungous museums; morning walks in the bewitchingly charming rural England, and evenings spent treading the cobbled streets of towns or wide roads of London – each feigning a familiarity conditioned by Dickens, Christie, Conan Doyle I had devoured decades ago. Thinking Fast and Slow is the paragon of science written for laypersons. It introduced me to the astonishing world of cognitive psychology and changed the manner I look – or attempt to look – at our behaviour.

There are books that I find ordinary or even cumbersome. But I am a pernickety, superstitious reader. I cannot leave a book unfinished, however tedious, or stressful reading it may be – a warped sense of morality chastises me for long if I do. On occasions I have gone back to a book that in past I had judged lacklustre. Not infrequently, I have berated myself for being harebrained before, as I read the book again. One reads a book with his eyes but experiences it through his complete personality. We are not the same person today as we were in the past. Stephen Hawking’s small book on the immeasurably large universe, A Brief History of Time, and Steven Pinker’s style guide for beginners The Sense of Style, always remind me that it is never a folly to return to a book after a little while; especially when the first experience had been unremarkable.

 

Not all my books have such narratives hidden in their pages. But an account of the few that do, will comprise a book-length story.

Memory is not analogous, but digital. Capacity of our brain, massive though it is, is grossly inadequate to store all one endures in life. We see our life-stories, as discrete experiences – only a miniscule fraction of all our life moments – threaded on the string of time. From these we build narratives, and reminisce the vagaries of past.

My books are the pegs on which are hung some moments of my past.