All of yesterday, I’ve had my nose buried in Bilal Tanweer’s The Scatter Here is too Great. It’s a debut by a Pakistani author that did the rave-review circuit of the world’s major papers for its story that revolves around a bomb blast at Karachi’s Cantt Station, but never actually tells us of the explosion itself. Rather, he paints us snapshot pictures of the lives the blast touches, their ordinary joys and sorrows, interwoven with the reality of everyday violence. Just as shards of broken glass pieced together can never reflect the unshattered image, but only give us an almost glimpse of what once was, The Scatter reveals for us the lost beauty in Pakistan’s brokenness.
At the book’s close though, as I flipped back through the 200-odd pages, I realised the sentences I’d underscored most boldly, and the paragraphs I’d parenthesised most emphatically, were not about the nation’s tryst with violence, but Tanweer’s lucid reflections on love and the strange power of stories. That got me thinking. How different our public and private acts of reading are! What the world wants us to take away from books, often traces different trajectories from what our minds do actually glean, and I find that difference in the marginalia - in our immediate, honest, unfiltered writings on the margins of books. Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “In the marginalia, we talk only to ourselves; we therefore talk freshly — boldly — originally — with abandonment — without conceit.” Over the years, I’ve honed a glossary of marginalia responses - smilies for when lines make me happy, smilies with dimples for when I laugh, exclamation marks for the appalling, single hashtag for sharp insight, double hashtag for life-altering wisdom, etc, - besides, the comments and questions that make the book a two-sided conversation between author and reader.
The history of marginalia goes way back; the earliest records point to 11th Century medieval scribes who wrote on the sides of the books they hand-copied: “Thank God, it will soon be dark.”, “The parchment is hairy.” and “Now I’ve written the whole thing! For Christ’s sake, give me a drink.” Of the modern writers, Graham Greene is said to have filled each book of his 3,000-volume personal library with plot summaries, word counts, and interior dialogue. Often, marginalia has gone beyond the book itself: Ted Hughes' copy of his wife Sylvia Plath’s Ariel pointed to the stains on the side and labelled them “thatch-drip” from the roof of their home in Devon, England, and in David Foster Wallace’s copy of a Cormac McCarthy book, he’d drawn fangs and a moustache on the author’s photo.
What marginalia in retrospect reveals to us is a slice of the people we were when we first read the book; with every return, we always come back at least a little altered by time, underlining difference phrases, copying out different quotes. We also leave for the next reader, a twice-layered text - I’ll always remember that copy of Jane Austen’s Emma discovered at the footpath seller in Mumbai’s Fort, its every page covered in footnotes and post-its about how Emma’s life parallelled the reader’s own. In the age of Kindle, though, just how much of our half-baked, scribbled-on-the-margins wisdom will our future generations inherit? Will they too have, as Billy Collins wrote “seized the white perimeter as our own/and reached for a pen if only to show/ we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;/we pressed a thought into the wayside” (‘Marginalia’)?
