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.

Stories

When I was something around 3 or 4, my father bought for me the first piece of fiction I ever read. It was a hindi magazine called Nandan, full of stories of sweet little children who obeyed their mothers and never got into trouble, and of impish little children who sometimes disobeyed their mothers, but still managed to cause only so much mischief that everything would turn out all right in the end.

Since then, I have been a sucker for stories.

When I was six or seven, we used to play with makeshift bows and arrows, you know, little bows made of bamboo sticks split down the middle and dried and smoothed so the sharp edges would not cut our hands- 18 inch bows, fitted with the strings they used to sew those jute bags of wheat with, and armored with one and a half feet arrows of reed. Sometimes, just like the kids who like to play with kites and who sex up their manjha, we used to sex up our arrows. A little bit of coaltar applied to the tip of the arrow would give it weight, and would ensure that when all the local Arjunas of the village went into a pissing match of who could shoot an arrow the furthest, you would be affected a bit less by the wind, and your fate would rest more in the strength of you shoulders. And, of course, the level of enthusiasm you had for the chastising that would follow if any of the elders caught you playing with these potentially eye-damaging equipments.

When we grew older (by a couple years), the test of the strength of the shoulders that came into vogue, was kabaddi. As expected, I was a sissy on a kabaddi field, never touching anyone, never killing anyone, doing my best to not get caught, and not putting up a fight, once I did. And then, someone introduced me to a bat and a ball, and since then, that was it. What is the point of it all? Stories. I am telling you stories which might or might not interest you or affect you, the same way they did when I was a kid.

And then I got sent off to a boarding, and thus started my real tryst with stories. But it was not until college that I really began to understand them- the essence of stories which we told or listened to.
What is the significance of stories? And how are they best told? We know that they are mostly written for heroes. The victor always gets his story written. And sometimes, someone stands up to tell the tale of the one who lost, from his perspective. And the wrong becomes the wronged against, or not, depending on how pursuasive the chronicler is. Every fairytale told from the point of view of the orge bears a sad story, or maybe not- how can predisposing factors justify evil? And yet, we have the fairytales of the brothers Grimm. And more importantly, history. What we have lived.

And a rich tradition of oral history, which is the most treacherous and prevalent of all. Anecdotes are not good friends of one in search of superficial pictures, because the ones which are most often told are the ones which are agreeable to most people. And, yet, they might not be the most correct ones. Because, you know, victory might not always be definitive or truthful.

So, why the stories about the bows and arrows then? Simple, really. Whenever we played those games, the arrows would land some seventy-eighty yards away in fields of wheat-stumps. And there would be one person keeping watch where everyone's arrow fell. And some arrows would always, freakishly, get carried away by the wind. A minor form of cheating in children's games.

But you get my point, I guess. Now think about those whose stories are not told.

Tell Us About Feeling Lonely, Then.

‘Ok, then. Define being lonely.’

‘Oh, that is almost too easy. Are you trying to mock me?’

‘No. Go on. Define it.’

‘Which one do you want me talk about? The evenings when you come home to an empty, unkempt house, dust swirling with every footstep that you take, the smell of stale French toast left uneaten from the morning’s breakfast dogging every movement, the hum of the airconditioner like the taunt of a spinster aunt who wants the revenge for her uselessness in your companionship, the crazy creaking of the fan as it tries to deal with closed windows and rancid toast, or coldness of the frozen juice that seems tasteless against your lips? Does that excite your imagination, the flat out boredom of a thousand books crammed in too little bookshelf-space, the feeling of dread which comes at the very thought of reading them, the consternation which arrives at the thought of having to hate what you love or having to love what you hate, and not knowing which way around it is?’

‘You make being lonely sound like it comes in a brownpaper-wrapped package, couriered to you straight from a sixties movie set.’

‘What do you want to hear then? How much it is like white noise? How you stay awake at night at self-hate o’clock, wanting to throw your shoe at that creaking fan, then wishing you would? Chasing your past like a dog without a bone, willing to see it, and hating to see it in the darkness of the night, tugging at your pillow-face down, eyes closed? That a lonely person is a movie star who, during the day, wisecracks lines they adapt for sitcoms, who in the night gets drunk and mouths lines cloy enough to have been spoken by Bogart in Casablanca? ‘You know mister, when I was a young…’? Tinny pianos do feature in all our lives, but never gloriously, you know. It is mostly mundane. Silent nights spent sober and unsleepy; raging nights spent drunk and maudlin, nights nights nights…You can find the drama, if you want. It is not uninteresting.’

‘Now we are getting somewhere. Care to elaborate?’

‘Yeah. Fuck you. Over and over again. Say that to yourself a thousand times, and you might get some idea.’

I might. Or Not.

So, we lost everything,

and there were to be no more

mornings. No more sunshine smiles,

no grieveous ‘I Hate You’s’

We have close shop. Go on. Move

on. This place is too crowded. I

might or might not love you. It is

damn sure I ain’t gonna say,

either way.

All, that does not matter

Pretty soon, though not very soon, I will be turning thirty. That seems like a lot of years to have lived, certainly a lot of weeks, and a hell of a lot of days. One would imagine I have seen a lot, in this period, and maybe I have. I have seen bits of sunshine and surely too much of moonshine; bits of sublime magic and dollops of crass trickery; some love and a lot, lot more indifference. And yet, most of what I remember, most of what I think about is not a brochure for the past, but a catalog of the present.

I remember less of the magic which was there in my mother’s hands, as she talked to this young boy while also preparing for the evening meal, sitting her plates and pans on the roof as she prepared to decimate a basketful of vegetables, her salt-and-pepper hair made to appear brown by the reddish light of the sun setting beyond her, its light obscured by the palms some distance away sometimes, sometimes crashing upon us like the last flickering light of a bulb about to blow. Yes, I say decimate- she cooked for thirteen people, there was no time for the split-slice-chop-dice-into-rectangles-squares-oblong-and-circular pieces finesse to that, and yet they did come out like that, may be her ferocity of will made their shapes turn, all I remember is the knife moving metronomically in her hand, as I stare, mesmerized at a feat I cannot even now manage. I do not remember what we talked about in that half hour we shared, me sitting there with my bowl-ful of puffed rice and some onions and green chillies which still taste like heaven. Probably it was about me telling her about the anger I carried over from a June day spent playing cricket in the sun and losing matches and she sitting there eloquently explaining her frustrations to the vegetables, while bantering equably with me about life in my boy’s school and what I did on Thursdays which were half days. What I had seen in those days was wide open skies which would glower at us for most part, but which still wrapped themselves around the world like a cool sheet when evening arrived; behaving, for most part, like a father who is unhappy with his child’s examination result. What I had seen those days was nights which, today, I can call as comforting as a lover’s embrace; nights were a place where you took all your exhaustion to, and in the cool breeze it all turned into a joyful, comforting sleep which was the sweetest thing you had had all your life.

Those days are not possible today, which is why this is not a brochure, merely a catalog. Today, I see a morning as a mad scramble to get out of home before the rest of the world does, so that I can avoid the traffic. I get delayed by five minutes, and I face the snarls and sniggers and mockery and frustration of the traffic as it swirls around me like a very angry and very dirty flood. I stop at a signal, and a truck breathes its slow crawl towards death in my face, in a hot and ugly whisper it tells me what there is to know about my life- less than can be written a post-it. The nights no longer are like a lover’s embrace; they are not spent under the stars. Now, the air-conditioner hums and breathes its icy, intermittent cackle down my neck as I write this, as humorless as an angry wife. I have a shelf-ful of books which I intent to read someday, and keep on adding to, and it stares at me as I fritter away my time much as if it were a stern matron, and I, a noisy patient in a hospital dorm.

But I know that what happened was my choice. I chose to grow up the way I am. And lost something. Now I know not what it was.