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.
