Of childhoods, and story shops

I would have been around six or seven when my father bought me my first book of stories. It was an issue of Nandan, a children’s magazine I think still comes out. While not my first story, or my first story book by any means, it was, in ways I am still realizing, a watershed moment in a lifetime full of reading and books.

Not that I had not had stories before Nandan. I was born in the early eighties in a village in Bihar (which, to this date, is the only place I can definitively call home), and when born, I inherited a gaggle of grandmas, aunties, uncles, brothers (never cousins), and sisters. And they inherited me. That was the time a child was not a child, (s)he was a communal responsibility, and seeing a crying kid meant you had to make it smile. My nostalgia colors my memories somewhat, but only somewhat.

And so there was the concept of ‘katha’. In winters, there would be campfire like affairs and all the old guys (grandfathers) and the kids (grandchildren) would sit together, muffled in sweaters and shawls and monkeycaps against the cold Bihar winters and the old’uns would tell stories. In the nights, you would sleep with your gramma and she would tell you stories till you slept. They were not pretty stories, always; not always ending happily, or proceeding happily…a lot of them had enough bloodshed and destruction to give pause to Michael Bay and enough retributive justice to cause a fire and brimstone preacher to go mute. But they were always told in a just right way. Anyway, the point was that that Nandan was not the first introduction to stories. And since I did not buy it, it was not my first visit to a bookshop either.

Children often crave forbidden things, things they cannot reach. When I was a child, the spare bedroom in our house had one of those attic-type racks hanging from the ceiling, full of odds and ends. It was forbidden, naturally. Three feet children can suffer serious harm if they fall from nine feet ledges. But we managed to find chairs and tables and to put chairs over tables and, well…mischief managed. The unreliable memory says a dholak (from my father’s college days, probably); a few cartonful of old shoes (again my father’s probably, kept against all reason by a thrifty mother); some out of use receipt books (most likely from a series of failed business ventures my uncle tried to get into at that time); and a half-attic full of books and magazines from when my father was graduating. That was my first real introduction to fiction. And, a real book shop. For a bookshop is not a place where you go to find what you want to buy…it is all those real places you go to to find what you want to read.

And that was my place. Bundles upon bundles of Maya and Ravivar and the initial issues of India Today in Hindi and (gasp!) Mayapuri. They were responsible for my subsequent interest in the Phantom, Mandrake, Hindi sports novels (Shobhabazaar, I think,  by don’t know who (please tell me if you know…if I remember correctly, it was a Hindi translation of a Bangla novel, ironically published in the Hindi translation of an English magazine); they were responsible for teaching much of the history of my country that I know; and it being the early eighties, much of the revulsion I have for some of the leading political leaders of that time. They gave me (though I did not realize it then), a political ideology or what remains of it, a social sensibility, a sense of humanity and imagination and adventure and the never-endingness of the sensuality of the world, and a love for the written word. That place, a 2X4 attic in the spare room of my home was the place I learnt to read.

Of course, by the early nineties, the parents shooed me off to a boarding, and I found a library which was like that attic, only on a gigantic scale; and I took to it with a sense of mischief that once prompted the librarian to threaten to write to my parents, as the gentleman felt I was devoting all my time to Enid Blyton and Noddy et al. Trust me, I had to show my reportcard to get out of that one. And then I moved to Patna, and the best bookstores I have seen in my life.

It all starts with why you read, and moves on to what you read. When you are 58 inches and 40-some kgs and unaware of the latest bollywood shenanigans and specialize in hurling hard wooded stuff and your only redeeming social skill is a bloodymindedness with a cricket ball in hand, sinking yourself in the printed page is a good option. Of course, the bloodymindedness and the cricket ball and short temper allow you to not be written off entirely; and so you survive on your knowledge of cricket and useless trivia you have accumulated for so many years reading so much stuff, and your skill at twenty-nine. And when you hate it all, you bunk lectures, and while the other kids slink into the morning show of that movie with the poster of the blonde with unnatural looking body parts and a yellow vest too small for her, you go and sit at a bookstall in Danapur and read comics, one rupee each, describing the adventures of Nagraj and Super Commando Dhruva and Doga and the ever hilarious Bankelal; mostly with female characters with even more unnatural attributes than the ones in the movies your friends have gone to watch, and with even skimpier clothes. Long live Raj Comics.

But, of course, the real joy of Patna was Gandhi Maidan, and the booksellers near Regent. While they made a living selling ‘competition books’, those were the guys who would buy anything and everything for a price ranging from five bucks to five thousand bucks and sell it for similar prices. That was the first real Amazon, the first real Flipkart of my life; the first real place where I could find everything I wanted, and a lot of the stuff I did not know I wanted. With the options of returning the books after reading, and taking other books back. In truth, it was the first Blossoms of my life.

I owe four years of my life to those roadside bookstalls from whom I purchased mostly Frederick Forsyths and Jeffery Archers and Hardy Boys, but the occasional Shakespeare and Voltaire too (what bores!). And, that 4 years coincided with the years of my life when I was required to read Shakespeare and Dickens and Shelly and Keats and Bronte and Shaw. And that was the times I learned that hindi pulp fiction was fun too, that Surendra Mohan Pathak and Ved Prakash Sharma et al could be tremendous fun and could stop the world for two hours and 200 pages. That was the time I learned to enjoy Hindi literature (reading Kamaleshwar’s Kitne Pakistan serialized in Hindustan- the only great novel I have read in a serial fashion), my first few episodes of Hans and Kathadesh…that was the time I vaguely began to realize what made great literature great. Then I moved to Guwahati, which was a very nice place except for the lack of any really good bookstores and then to Jamshedpur, which was the same, and that one lack in both places makes them cities with a hole in the place where there heart would be. Except in Jamshedpur, in the term before I was due to leave, a Spencer’s opened, and one of my close friends got a PhD grant, and he treated us to a book-fest, some of which I still haven’t finished reading.

The point of all this nostalging being, bookstores. They are not always places you find physically, or virtually. They are places you find mentally…something goes twang, and there you are…standing in that small hovel, holding in your hand the little, yellowed, falling apart copy of the book you never knew you wanted, but would pay a year’s salary for at that moment. Till reality hits. That place in your mind is the bookstore, the story shop…because the story in your hands is your own, and that moment of your time is all you live for. Your bookstore is in your mind.