Books - 2
Throughout my school days, I was starved for books, I never had enough to read. Our house had very few books. My father was not a reader and my mother read sometimes but hardly bought books. My uncle always gifted me McMillan classics, that I mentioned before, but I'd get through them in a week and be hungry again. Libraries would only give you 2 or 4 books every few weeks. Most people who had books never wanted to lend them and with good reason - books and umbrellas are the two most not-returned things that people borrow. I would stare at people's bookshelves longingly and hope that they would notice and say "do you want to take a book home to read?" (That's how I got into the habit of rereading favourites, like visiting old friends. One book was the complete novels of Jane Austen. Another one was Rabindranath's "Gora" in Bengali. I have no idea why I found that book so fascinating. It contained a couple of love stories and a startling revelation at the end but mostly it was a long argument about religion.)
That is why a December day in the early eighties stands out in my memory. I had fractured a bone at the end of my college semester and had to miss some exams and stay home for weeks - never before or since, have I been so unutterably bored. I pleaded with my mom to get me some books from somewhere, anywhere. So she went over to the Bachhawat's house. They were a friendly, reading family we sometimes spent our Sundays with. She came back and started taking books out of a bag, first two, then five ...then another bag, then another..maybe 20 books in all! They had all had different ideas about which books to give me and had piled more and more on to my mother's arms. Never in my entire life until then, had I been given or lent so many unread books at one time. I've forgotten what those books were but "Men of mathematics" was one of them and maybe "My family and other animals." Bless you dear Bachhawats, wherever you are!
Another house where books were not kept under lock and key and came and went freely was my aunt's. Her three college going kids were avid readers and so were their friends. I don't think any of them thought that books could be owned and tagged as "mine" or "yours". The give and take between them was unbounded and the turnover rate of their bookshelves was so high, that visiting them after a couple of months, you would find to your delight, an entirely different set of books to browse through and enjoy. I used to go to college in a different place at that time. So I never really became part of this collective book readership circle.
People talk about reading as if it's a superior thing to do but frankly, in my life, it's been an addiction and an escape (...and also something that has immeasurably enriched my life, but who is to say that cannot happen without reading?). I've never smoked and only rarely partaken (and not enjoyed) small quantities of alcohol. But I think I have some inkling how a person addicted to such substances feels - first through my food cravings (just a few peanuts, a small piece of cookie, then I'll stop..) and then through the sudden cravings I used to get for some new reading material, especially late at night. When I lived in my parent's neighbourhood, after college and before I came to the US, I actually had a supplier - a generous person with a large glass-fronted case full of a very good selection of books. Her brother-in-law, a retired professor of English, had left them with her for some reason and she freely allowed people to borrow them but under one condition. You had to write the date and the names of the books in a notebook she kept on the top of the case and check them off when you returned them. Most readers were too embarrassed to take out more books without returning the previous lot, so her system worked really well. At 10 o' clock at night I would convince myself that it wasn't too late to pay a visit to Kakali mashi and, bless her understanding soul, she always welcomed me, no matter the hour. I lost touch with Kakali mashi - I left and then she moved away. But when she passed away last year, I was not surprised to learn that, after she retired from her college teaching job, she had been an enthusiastic organizer of a book fair in her new locality.
This is a story with a happy ending (temporary of course, all endings - happy or sad - are followed by addenda, appendices, ammendments). The girl who never had enough books to read, moves to a place where there are houses full of books, free for the taking and no limit (NO LIMIT! ok I think it's 50 but that's close enough to infinity) on the number you can check out at one time. Soon after I moved to the US for grad school (and felt like I had gotten a second chance at life), I stood under a maple in full fall regalia one sunny day and said to myself, "Right now I'm perfectly happy. No matter what happens after this, it won't change the fact that right now I'm perfectly happy." I resolved then to notice moments like this and save them in my mind for comfort in tough times. There was the joyous early spring day when I came back from the library sale, through avenues lined by mists of purple, yellow, bright green, bearing a box full of books purchased for five dollars. Another summer day, in my memory, I'm walking past groups of laughing children, playing on the green in front of my house, towards the bookmobile, parked on the far side of the meadow, with the setting sun as a backdrop. When people think of the US as a country of plenty, they think of it in terms of material abundance, never of the succor provided to people in so many ways through the public library system. This system is now under attack..but that attack, in the long run, will not succeed. As this article says "Ask Galileo".
That is why a December day in the early eighties stands out in my memory. I had fractured a bone at the end of my college semester and had to miss some exams and stay home for weeks - never before or since, have I been so unutterably bored. I pleaded with my mom to get me some books from somewhere, anywhere. So she went over to the Bachhawat's house. They were a friendly, reading family we sometimes spent our Sundays with. She came back and started taking books out of a bag, first two, then five ...then another bag, then another..maybe 20 books in all! They had all had different ideas about which books to give me and had piled more and more on to my mother's arms. Never in my entire life until then, had I been given or lent so many unread books at one time. I've forgotten what those books were but "Men of mathematics" was one of them and maybe "My family and other animals." Bless you dear Bachhawats, wherever you are!
Another house where books were not kept under lock and key and came and went freely was my aunt's. Her three college going kids were avid readers and so were their friends. I don't think any of them thought that books could be owned and tagged as "mine" or "yours". The give and take between them was unbounded and the turnover rate of their bookshelves was so high, that visiting them after a couple of months, you would find to your delight, an entirely different set of books to browse through and enjoy. I used to go to college in a different place at that time. So I never really became part of this collective book readership circle.
People talk about reading as if it's a superior thing to do but frankly, in my life, it's been an addiction and an escape (...and also something that has immeasurably enriched my life, but who is to say that cannot happen without reading?). I've never smoked and only rarely partaken (and not enjoyed) small quantities of alcohol. But I think I have some inkling how a person addicted to such substances feels - first through my food cravings (just a few peanuts, a small piece of cookie, then I'll stop..) and then through the sudden cravings I used to get for some new reading material, especially late at night. When I lived in my parent's neighbourhood, after college and before I came to the US, I actually had a supplier - a generous person with a large glass-fronted case full of a very good selection of books. Her brother-in-law, a retired professor of English, had left them with her for some reason and she freely allowed people to borrow them but under one condition. You had to write the date and the names of the books in a notebook she kept on the top of the case and check them off when you returned them. Most readers were too embarrassed to take out more books without returning the previous lot, so her system worked really well. At 10 o' clock at night I would convince myself that it wasn't too late to pay a visit to Kakali mashi and, bless her understanding soul, she always welcomed me, no matter the hour. I lost touch with Kakali mashi - I left and then she moved away. But when she passed away last year, I was not surprised to learn that, after she retired from her college teaching job, she had been an enthusiastic organizer of a book fair in her new locality.
This is a story with a happy ending (temporary of course, all endings - happy or sad - are followed by addenda, appendices, ammendments). The girl who never had enough books to read, moves to a place where there are houses full of books, free for the taking and no limit (NO LIMIT! ok I think it's 50 but that's close enough to infinity) on the number you can check out at one time. Soon after I moved to the US for grad school (and felt like I had gotten a second chance at life), I stood under a maple in full fall regalia one sunny day and said to myself, "Right now I'm perfectly happy. No matter what happens after this, it won't change the fact that right now I'm perfectly happy." I resolved then to notice moments like this and save them in my mind for comfort in tough times. There was the joyous early spring day when I came back from the library sale, through avenues lined by mists of purple, yellow, bright green, bearing a box full of books purchased for five dollars. Another summer day, in my memory, I'm walking past groups of laughing children, playing on the green in front of my house, towards the bookmobile, parked on the far side of the meadow, with the setting sun as a backdrop. When people think of the US as a country of plenty, they think of it in terms of material abundance, never of the succor provided to people in so many ways through the public library system. This system is now under attack..but that attack, in the long run, will not succeed. As this article says "Ask Galileo".
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