My childhood was very quiet. Both my parents were busy doctors and would return home late at night. I would get back from school in the afternoon and pad around the silent, empty house alone, walking in and out of doors, placing my ears on walls to listen. But the walls were reticent too. The house was tiny so there weren’t too many variations to my daily routes through it. Yet I would poke at corners and pull at things stacked away pretending to see them for the first time. On one such occasion when I was six, perhaps seven years old, I discovered two big boxes and one old almirah – full of books!
Illustration by Alia Sinha
These belonged to my parents who had to leave their homes in a hurry when they eloped. Busy with work and setting their lives on a new course, they perhaps did not find time in all these years to open the boxes. I knew they both loved reading- the one thing strewn around all over these tiny rooms all the time were different kinds of books. But I had yet to explore them.
As I opened the boxes and started picking up the books they almost tumbled out themselves. Old books, dilapidated books, second hand books, scribbled upon books. Books which had covers torn off, and those which had whole sections missing. Books so old that you could barely read the print, and then those that smelt like they have never been opened. I started counting them – in the boxes and the almirah. They seemed alive to me. A bunch of cackling women and men. Inside my head they were bursting with the cacophony of life in that quiet afternoon. And the gurgling sound of wild rivers of words seemed to gush out of them slowly drowning me. I don’t remember if I did finish the census of books, but that day changed my afternoons alone at home, and in many ways my life.
It was that strange experience of feeling ecstatic while being submerged in that ocean of words – that only true place of belonging and unbelonging. I was too young to understand the full ramifications of falling in love head over heels. I had no clue that this would be one of those enduring loves which will never leave you alone. I was also too little to be bothered by the age-appropriateness of books. So I read everything. Day after day I would come back from school take one book out and read till I finished. It did not matter what or how much I understood.
Life that starts in a small town has a tentative temporariness about it. You know from the time you are a child that you are here only for a short time. You see others leave town as they finish their school, never really to return. Yes, they come back for holidays or between education and jobs, but they become in many ways, people of other worlds. As a child you don’t fathom all of this, but you do listen carefully to your Ma saying how one day you will study in a big college in a big city, and then go to work in a bigger world. Even before you understand what your roots are or what they could even mean, you prepare yourself to be a traveller. Ideas of constant departures and arrivals fill up your sense of where you belong – to temporary places of the future, to the inns of the world. My love for books and the written word started with this realisation as well, I believe.
In the pages of these books I discovered the many worlds of many people – stories of victories and failures, love and loss, gods and goddesses, the sorrows and joys of common, insignificant lives. They opened up for me worlds of other people’s lives, their desires and aspirations, their anger and hate, belonging and exiles. They were all in Bangla, but the stories were from all over the world. I read my first French and Russian literature in Bangla, as I did Hindi and English writers. Ma soon found out and I started finding the piles of books grow with more and more children’s books in there. (Though I must say by the time I was ten or twelve I found them pretty boring.)
One thing my parents never did was to tell me not to read anything. I don’t know if they were too busy working hard to make a living, or truly believed that a child should read everything. All I know is that I was reading books banned from circulation with court cases around them, together with books about gruesome war crimes. I knew various ways in which murders could be committed (which I sensed I’d not want to do) and the number of lovers it was possible to have (which I was curious about). I read Prajapati by Samaresh Bose, which fought several court cases for 17 years between 1968 and 1985 at the Lower Court, High Court and Supreme Court as it was banned by the government for obscenity. When the Supreme Court finally gave a verdict in its favour, it was reprinted with record sales! I remember wondering, if the subject of the book was life and love in difficult circumstances, why was it ever banned! I asked myself why anything was banned from reading, knowing, learning, understanding. I also asked Ma what was ‘ban’ I remember. I don’t recall her exact answer, but she said something along the lines of it being a mischief that must not be done!
I never asked my parents what I should read, and they never enquired, though I have a sneaky suspicion that they knew. I did realise later that my stubborn habit of asking ‘why’ if I was asked ‘not to’ do, say, or be anything came from my reading everything and anything. I am not sure how parenting principles of the 21st century will look at such utter lack of control, but I am so glad they did not stop me and I have turned out pretty alright I think!
At the time we were a low income household and soon my parents introduced me to the local library. I had overheard Ma and Baba discussing not being able to keep up with my voracious reading habit. The local library in Asansol was a quaint little bungalow probably built by the British, close to the courthouses. There began my weekly sojourns into a dusty but surprisingly well stocked haven of books. I came upon English books (outside my curriculum materials in class) here for the first time, and Hindi ones. There were I remember some other books of south Indian languages too, but I did not know which ones they were. Asansol was a cosmopolitan little industrial town so the library reflected that diversity. Since then every town and city I have lived in- and they are quite a few- libraries have been places I have haunted.
I have missed a few lunches with would-be paramours, the first hour of an important exam, a performance by a world famous santoor player, the last bus back to the hostel, and picking Ma up from the railway station on a rather rainy afternoon – all because of libraries. There is something about them that makes you pause your time and freeze your space, while taking you away to many others. There is something about them that evokes both, a resting place and an adventure, where you are still and walking at the same time. Something that makes you feel like a tiny yet vital speck of a continuing universe in flow. I cannot separate the love of books and those of libraries very much, although I feel in my blood the difference between reading a book in the park or at home, and reading in a library. At the library I feel as if I’m in the presence of hundreds of living minds on the pages of the hoards of books around. It is like witnessing and being witnessed at the same time.
That small town sense of belonging and unbelonging has been part of my lived experience in my adult life. I often see my life both as an inn and that of a traveller. One who moves around the world and where people come and go, both making and collecting stories. Books for me are like meeting people from all over the world, in their rarest, commonest, most vulnerable or most courageous moments. And libraries – an inn for its travellers. One day I want to make a library of books yet to be written- those that I feel must be. By people I have not met yet, but want to.