I was looking at a glossy magazine which is about interior design, I think. And I turned a page and there was one of those magnificent rooms which featured a library. There was a shelf of Penguins, all their spines orange and white, orange and white, orange and white, a syncopation of colour. It was perfect. Immediately, I felt envy surging up inside me and with it the spiteful feeling: ‘You can’t possibly love books. This looks like clickbait, like a shelf set up so as to be admired rather than for reading. This is not very different from the way British gentlemen designed their libraries, by the yard, in the right shade of leather, as a backdrop to the drinking and the snoozing that they planned to do in their man caves.’
I felt ashamed of myself. Perhaps the young people who had set up house together had actually had the good fortune of loving a series of Penguin books, not impossible surely, and had managed to acquire the right editions. I have never been able to do that. My books come from a variety of sources and have made their way into this house on the immediate need for them. I have only ever had one set of show books, an Arabian Nights translated by Richard Burton, 11 volumes of the nights and seven volumes of the supplementary Nights . The books were bound in faux leather, they were embossed in gold (for the Nights) and silver (for the Supplementaries) and I bought them at a small circulating library in Dadar for a total of ₹700. My sister and I chipped in for them and we had to take a small loan too. Then we had to smuggle them into the house because we were under-age.
Forget the birthdays
My father had a rule. He did not think children should be allowed to buy books. He thought they should get them out of circulating libraries and read them and return them and get others. He said, “You’ll outgrow all the books you want to buy now.” Neither my sister nor I believed him. We thought we would read Enid Blyton for the rest of our lives. But this proscription made us into surreptitious book buyers. We saved our money, we sneaked the books into the house, we hid them among our clothes, we gloated over them... and I sometimes wonder whether my father did not intend exactly that to happen. Today, I give the children of my friends and cousins books and I see their faces fall almost immediately. I have books, they seem to say, Mom gets me books, Dad gets me books, everyone gets me books, everyone wants me to read books, I want video games and data and chocolate. It’s enough to make you want to forget about their birthdays entirely.
By and large, though my father was right about the books we bought as children. Most didn’t survive; all the Blytons are gone as are the Alistair MacLeans and the Jack Higginses. The Gerald Durrells are still around, so are the Wodehouses as is the first book my sister ever bought new: an Agatha Christie.
As young book buyers, new books were out of our reach. We could only buy what washed up on the streets of the city and we went looking faithfully. We once joined a circulating library simply to get a copy of These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer which did not seem to exist anywhere else in the city. And since we had managed to get hold of Devil’s Cub , this was an imperative. That meant we were not really interested in editions. In fact, we quite disliked editions. There was a time when some American editions of Wodehouse came to Bombay with quite different titles. We were delighted only to go home and find we had been swindled. Brinkley Manor turned out to be Right Ho, Jeeves but by then we were faithful buyers and were allowed to return the next day and take other books.
The books therefore look like books, they don’t look like an army. For a while, Arabian Nights did look a little like that but I soon grew embarrassed by them because I had not managed to read them. They are very tedious, if you want the truth. Many of the stories start and then encircle others. A young man sets out and he meets with misfortune and he comes to a village where there are three barbers and the first barber tells him about how he went to a certain city where he met three seamstresses and the first seamstress tells her story... all very fine and good but as soon as the first seamstress has told her story, you’re back with the second seamstress and then the third and you think, ‘Okay now’ but no, you’re back with the young man and the three barbers and it’s the turn of the second barber and he meets three djinns and so on... I could never keep track and when you’ve returned to the original young man who set out and met with misfortune, you couldn’t give a toss. The Wedding Guest got away lightly, you’d think.
There are times when a new edition comes out. Someone brings out all the old Wodehouses in a new ‘look’ and I wonder if I should. Then I look at my prizes and each one tells me of how I walked home and saved the bus money for that one or how I read that one on the train home, laughing aloud all the way and I think: these books have decorated my heart.
The author tries to think and write and translate in the cacophony of Mumbai.
