Reading books on beaches

Walking on loose sand in flip-flops builds character as opposed to walking on tightly packed sand still being lashed at by the tide. Have you ever noticed that the last and most successful incursion of the tide leaves slight, wavy outlines drawn in slightly more grainy sand over other finer sand, wavy much in the same way as the curves of the lines a child draws clouds in. And that the sea when it goes back leaves a fine meshwork of lines in the sand forming grids shaped like spindles or crescents or what have you, occasionally pockmarked with the tiny burrow holes of the very small sand crabs which scuttle around. As you walk around sometimes the tide will wash across your ankles and calves and when you turn back you see that the footprints you had left in the sand have been washed away which is absolutely fine with me, not being much of a footprint leaver/follower anyway.

The first time I take the 30 minutes’ walk on this beach looking for a quiet place where I can just sit down and read it is eleven in the afternoon and the sun beats down heating the sand under my feet and the air around me and boils all the snark filled up inside of me so that I feel a strange, selfish, and I am sure far from unique sense of antipathy towards these people frolicking around, cooling themselves in the water or tanning themselves on the beach. Those young men throwing balls at each other and laughing their joy as the sand flies in sprays where their feet hit the ground, the mother with their children standing at the very edge of the surf and letting out Kilgorish whoops of joy as the sea laps at their ankles or sometimes going as far up as their calves, the middle aged, the other children who are running everywhere, occasionally bursting into sounds like firecrackers set loose randomly,  balding men who lie on deck chairs amid their rolling layers of fat, like beached whales, their pale bellies generously slopped with suntan oils/creams with spare bottles lying around just in case more is needed, their mouths open, gaping at the world as if they are inhaling the sound of the surf through their mouths- in that instant I hate them all. I hate them for enjoying themselves so much, I blame them for the fact that their vacations seem to be going just according to plan while I want just one simple thing from my vacation and that is to read a book in a quiet beach side bar with a bottle of beer at my elbow and for having walked for thirty minutes in this heat without having found one quiet place to do so. At that moment I blame them for everything that is wrong with the world. And a minute after that I realize how mean and petty and cheap and selfish I am being and something that is very much like shame seems to wash down on me. A few minutes after that I find my quiet place.

Just for the record, the novel I am reading is Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and as I dive into it, Stephenson’s gleeful snark at pop culture while ironically writing a novel about major factions of that pop culture seems to perfectly complement my snark from a few minutes ago- right from the moment where he introduces his main protagonist as The Deliverator to his descriptions of the pizza delivery industry as the most intensely competitive one in the world to the moment where we come to know that the protagonist is called just that: Hiro Protagonist.

But I started off writing this not intending to make this an essay on what I feel about beach vacations or Snow Crash. I like reading on beaches and do so whenever I get the chance to just plop myself on the beach. My favourite adventure sport while on vacations is plonk myself right there on a chair or just a towel, listen to the sea and immerse myself into whatever book I am reading at that moment. The sounds of the sea soothe me and mostly I don't mind even if there are people around, though it is better if they are not.

I have always had an intense fascination for the sea, having always found some sort of awful majesty even in the dirty waters of Juhu- I have written awful poems about it, essays that do not express ten percent of what I feel when there, I have read stories and novels which have attempted to tell me what their authors feel about being there, but in the end listening to the sea is something which cannot be done with someone else's ear- that is like trying to have a spontaneous conversation with the services of a translator. Or like listening to someone else read a book. The best way to know what it is like, you have to go there and listen to it just like to really read a book, you have to really read it. The sea tells you things, I imagine it tells all of us of different things. The only way to know what it tells you is to go to it, close your eyes for a moment and listen.

Somehow, I have always thought it is the same with books. Someone (I think DFW) once said that every writer begins with writing in someone else's voice, then slowly she finds her feet and her voice becomes her own. I have always felt much the same about reading. When we first begin reading, we read with someone else's eyes: either taking the author literally as she has written it, or reading in the words of the author the validation or condemnation of the critic whose review we read before reading the book and then, finally, when we are really reading, we read the book in its own words, with our own eyes and then the books begin to tell us things. They begin to sing to us, their voices telling us stories which might be found in the pages of the books but which are as much inside our head. Much like the sea. And that is the secret of all things in this world, isn't it? The secret of all things holy and what makes reading or going to the sea or writing or living a holy experience? That going to a beach or reading a book or living a life is not about going to the beach or the story of the book or the legacy of our life at all. It is about the stories that form- what the sea tells us, what stories that book leaves in our head, what we take in as we live our lives.

P.S.: I might have forgotten to mention that the female protagonist of Snow Crash is a girl called Y.T. which stands for Yours' Truly.

Residuals

Scary thought: there are words, sentences even. But no stories can be found.

Lack of coherence and purpose. A litany of activity that is reduced to mere chores. Colours fading independently and into each other, dull, rusty, helpless, themselves tainted with age. Loneliness masquerading as solitude. Scary thought: somewhere in all the words, conversation was lost.

Ersatz memories substituting for desires, second string players moving incoherently in a ballpark. Where did everyone go, when did we lose everything? Cold comfort for change-

What is left? Inside is a great cold hard ball which refuses to melt.

Nothing?

One day, all this heartbreak will erupt as a sharp, shooting pain in the chest, a blinding fireball of horror made of all the unbearableness of life and for a moment everything will be black and then he will be back in his greatgrandpa’s village, lying on a cot by the edge of a mango orchard and the sun will be a painted crimson disc in the far sky framed by inky clouds and a gentle breeze will caress his lined face and a single songbird will trill into the dusk. And then, there will be peace.

Morning walks

I do not go for walks in the morning, anymore-

an inky sky turning crimson, and the wind caressing

my hair, lifting yesterday’s leaves into tiny eddies, trees

waking up, shaking off last night’s silver-

these leave me cold.

Morning walks

are conversations with oneself- feet meeting ground

soundlessly, causing echoes in the heart, asking

questions not understood, offering answers

not quite asked for.

Mornings now are cacophonies of abjurement- glossy

magazine stories interspersed with food wrappers and old

newspapers, plastic cups, cigarette stubs, the odd computer disk,

a purple Frisbee chewed on by a dog: a loneliness hidden in bright

colours, and discarded. All these stories;

a terminal sadness, flaunted in

bold renunciations- new things, new lives, new paths, accreted

over the desiderata of previous lives. There is no peace in this.

Morning walks

are painful self-examinations.

Distance

Your hair fly and brush my face
gentle wings of dreams unrealized
as I see your face like this is the last time I am seeing you.

Everytime I see you
it is an end of a world, there will
never be a time when I will meet you again,
Why do you change so?

Or, is it you who stay the same, and I
keep changing, inconstant. We are different / not one, 
nor the same.

And when it all does not matter
what distance away from yourself
are you?

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.