One of the enduring pleasures derived from childhood and carried through till the last page of life comes from poring over books. To a child embarking on the pastime of reading, the magnetic pull is the visual treat — colourful illustrations that introduce the alphabets and numbers. One progressed step by step to fairy tales, detective stories, joke books, fiction and non-fiction in handy paperbacks, or tomes that kept company in bed till Lady Morpheus took over and pressed down the eyelids.
A stage is reached when the reader of books becomes a collector who would honour a good book by giving it space in his or her shelves where it will gather dust — unless borrowed by someone and not returned. As the collection of books swells, eventually becoming fit to be given the moniker of a mini-library, the owner becomes a bibliophile — living in his own world of epics, classics and omnibuses, with the invited concomitant worry of how to battle a film of dust, cobwebs, silver fish and so on, not to speak of book thefts and such.
As I waited, entertaining such thoughts, for my octogenarian mentor in his sprawling library, feasting my eyes on the colourful line-up of books that stood smartly like disciplined soldiers, I wondered how many words his eyeballs would have read. Lakhs? Crores?
With a discreet cough he appeared, his index finger acting as a book mark in the volume he carried. He had called me to be of assistance in the tricky task of drafting his will. Mind you, I am not a legal bird and would look like a chump if I heard terms like testator, testament, codicil and the like but might readily provide a laugh-line like ‘where there is a will, there is a law suit’ but that would be injudicious.
“I’ve a problem,” he said, “not in bequeathing my flats and financial savings but my valuable books.” He waved a gnarled hand in the direction of the shelves. “Poor things, who will take them? My son in the U.S. may not touch them with a barge pole, being a Wall Street wizard. He adores glossy balance sheets. My daughter of course reads a lot, but where would she stack my books in her match-box flat in Manhattan? Ah! Local libraries. But I don’t have the energy to hunt for the ones that might take them. Then again, libraries and bookstores are vanishing.”
“This book is about the Egyptian mummies buried along with necessities for their life after death. Wish I had a sprawling family tomb underground where I can be interred surrounded by these volumes to browse without having to bother about ill-health, fatigue or poor eyesight. But that will be a pipe dream,” he said, looking longingly at his books.
(Email: jsraghavan@yahoo.com)
