THE GIRL WHO
ATE BOOKS
ADVENTURES IN READING
NILANJANA ROY
For those ace storytellers, Ma and Baba,
who never once said, ‘You’re too young to read this.’
Contents
Prologue
ONE: EARLY DAYS
1. The Girl Who Ate Books
2. Finding Dean
3. How to Read in Indian
4. 1857 and All That
5. Pioneers: A Line of Unbroken Trust
6. Goodbye, Britannica
7. English, Vinglish
TWO: POETS AT WORK
1. Dom Moraes
2. Arun Kolatkar
3. Jeet Thayil
4. Agha Shahid Ali
5. Kamala Das
THREE: WRITERS AT WORK
1. Allan Sealy, in Dehradun
2. Kiran Nagarkar
3. Manjula Padmanabhan
4. Khushwant Singh
5. Arundhati Roy
6. Vikram Seth
7. Ruchir Joshi
8. Kiran Desai
9. Vikram Chandra
10. V.S. Naipaul
11. Ved Mehta
12. Nayantara Sahgal
13. Pico Iyer
14. Rohinton Mistry
FOUR: BOOKLOVE
1. Physical
2. Booklove: The Pavement Booksellers
3. The Baba Yaga in the Back Garden
FIVE: BOOKLOVERS – FIVE OF THE BEST
1. Ravi Dayal
2. Prof. Meenakshi Mukherjee
3. Sham Lal
4. P. Lal
5. K.D. Singh
SIX: PLAGIARISM – THREE UNORIGINAL STORIES
1. V.N. Narayanan
2. Kaavya Viswanathan
3. Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen
SEVEN: EXPRESSION
1. Hold Your Tongue
2. Empty Chairs
3. Crossing Over
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Book
About the Author
Copyright
Prologue
‘We’re done,’ I said.
It had taken almost two weeks of sweat—all too literal, in Delhi’s humidity—to clean up our bookshelves, and I was staring at the end result. The Holy Grail of bookshelves, the ultimate shrine, the sanctum sanctorum, the point where every booklover and hoarder’s pilgrimage ends: an empty shelf. Two of them. A gift from the gods, a sign, allowing us to continue on the manic, ruinous path of collecting books that marks a reader forever, setting him or her apart from the rest of the community as surely as you wearing a silver bell that rings: ‘Hoarder! Hoarder!’
Booklove is a dangerous thing. Those of us who have it do not joke about it or take it lightly, because booklove is all-consuming. You move houses with an eye to wall space, and you covet other people’s bookshelves, especially if they had more skilful carpenters than you.
My partner and I both inherited moderately large libraries, and perhaps we had fallen into the trap of thinking of these only as ‘family books’. The inheritance had come in a mass, as one solid bookshelf worth of things to be read and dusted and looked after. But as I sorted these books, I suddenly found myself back in touch with people whom I could never have known, because they had died before I was born.
As we pulled them out from the bookshelves, looking at the names inscribed in faded fountain-pen ink on the fly-leaf, I began to see more clearly the individual readers behind the ‘collection’.
Here was the doctor from two generations ago who loved history, here was the boy straight out of his village who built a broader world by reading in three languages, here were the reformers whose hopes for a better world were encased in their lectures, and the essays they collected.
My grandmother on one side brought in cookbooks, women’s magazines, Mills & Boons, and sometimes, the anguished memoirs of pioneering Bengali women. Her handwritten ledgers reminded me that none of my other grandmother’s books had survived—her collections of almanacs, volumes of Bengali literature and even her own short stories had disappeared after her death. I could almost see the gap in the bookshelves, remember the way her presence in our house had allowed us to float comfortably from English to Bengali, demanding and receiving stories in both languages.
Over the years of our marriage, these books had been buried underneath the inevitable layers of more and more books, the objects that haunt professional readers and reviewers. Discovering them made me wonder how we had sorted our shelves in the first place. The present had dislodged much of what was really important and meaningful, and there was a special pleasure in rescuing and re-reading what had been allowed to slip to the back.
The slow accumulation of books in any reader’s life testifies to many things, but chiefly, to hope. There is nothing more optimistic than a shelf-ful of books you have not yet read, but that you mean to get down to someday. And yet, too much booklove, and what you have is a disease; the books you do not love and would not normally read or keep or treasure, or tell friends about, accumulate thickly, like fungus, like mold, around the books that you truly love and will come back to, again and again.
As we assessed the books, perhaps we seemed ruthless, in the way that we discarded perfectly good writers and anthologies. But as I placed each book on the donations pile, I also sent up a silent prayer for it, hoping that it would find its readers.
Books, like people, like children, should always be certain of a warm welcome, wherever they go next. Few books survive in their physical form beyond 150–200 years; in that time, perhaps they should exchange readers a lot, perhaps they should be shared until their beautiful bound leaves start to drop and shed. They deserve to be loved, especially the old ones, that were hand-sewn, hand-bound, made with care.
As we cleaned each of those shelves, I inhaled dust for three weeks, and became sick from the past. We sniffed the pages of encyclopaedias and dictionaries so far beyond the restorer’s art that they fragmented at the lightest touch, exploding into the air like enchanted objects. But whenever I looked upon the books, mine and my partner’s, I felt a sense of kinship that went beyond the blood ties of family. The people who had bought and collected these books, our ancestors, were ordinary readers.
The two of us loved books and reading and authors for no good reason except that it had been encoded in our DNA by the previous generations, because we had lived in homes where everyone read books, as a matter of course. My father had grown up in a small town with a tiny library; in later years, he bought books expansively, with the same joy of the forbidden that was reserved for things like expensive, imported chocolates.
When I look more closely at the ‘family’ books, one thing stands out. You don’t collect books to demonstrate how much you know about the world; instead, these small libraries represent every reader’s acknowledgement of how little you know about the world, and how much you reach out for it anyway.
Collecting books is the same as looking up at the stars: you don’t want to own the stars, any more than you want to own books or the knowledge in them. All you hope to do is to brush the surface of wonder, to acknowledge that there is still, as an adult, some part of you that is always in awe of, and in love with, the world and the word.
*
This book is chiefly about the love of reading, and about a reading childhood in India. It is not intended to be a history of Indian writing in English (though you’ll find some excellent histories of Indian writing and publishing in the Bibliography) or a history of contemporary Indian writers. Instead, these essays track one reader’s journey—sometimes awkward, often magical—into becoming a writer. Most of these essays were writt
en for the general reader; my apologies in advance to those academics and scholars who are already familiar with Dean Mahomet and the rest of the gang of Indians who wrote in English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and who will not find much here that is revelatory. Because I love reading in Bengali and grew up in Delhi and Kolkata, these essays centre on English, Bengali and those two cities; I can only hope that readers incensed by this evidence of gross bias will redress the balance by writing their own memoirs of reading in other parts of India.
Some pieces originally intended for this edition were omitted, on reflection: three long essays on reading Indian writers in translation, on memoirs and writings about caste in India, and on cookbooks and on food writing seemed incomplete, and besides I wasn’t sure I was in any way qualified to speak on Dalit writers. Book reviews were left out for the most part because I prefer writing them to re-reading them. An ambitious essay on a subject close to my heart, the libraries and reading habits of prominent Indians in the national movement, has been set aside until I can find time to read the little magazines and journals of those decades.
The first two essays, ‘The Girl Who Ate Books’ and ‘Finding Dean’, are about reading, and the slow, tentative shift towards becoming a writer and finding my ‘family’: a bunch of excitable, eccentric and voluble Indians from the eighteenth and nineteenth century. ‘How To Read In Indian’ collects assorted profiles on the pioneers of Indian writing in English, from enterprising eighteenth-century spa proprietors armed with pamphlets and chutzpah, to the early twentieth-century woman who set up schools for Muslim girls and imagined a classic feminist Utopia. From the novels written after and about 1857 to a glimpse of the language debates over Indian English to a previous generation’s obsession with the Encyclopaedia Britannica, this section touches very lightly on the history of Indian writing in English across three centuries.
‘Coffee Break’ compiles short interviews with writers: from Kiran Desai and Pico Iyer to Nayantara Sahgal and Ved Mehta, most of these conducted for Business Standard over the last two decades, and includes two brief appraisals of the works of Rohinton Mistry and V.S. Naipaul.
The subsequent sections, ‘Booklove’ and ‘Booklovers’, are a tribute to fellow bibliophiles, and roams from childhood reading in the era when Soviet books flooded Indian libraries to reminiscences of houses built of books, and short memorial pieces to five stalwarts of the publishing and bookselling world. ‘Plagiarism’ and ‘Expression’ are explorations of faultlines of two kinds: the trouble that greed and carelessness can get writers into and the dangers of silence and censorship. ‘Crossing Over’, the last essay in this volume, is for everyone who wants, in their secret hearts, to be a writer.
I have only one suggestion to add: despite the title of this book, I can guarantee from personal experience that reading books will cause less heartburn and acidity than eating them. If you remain undeterred, choose books with crisp pages and matt rather than glossy covers, and remember that hardbacks (and poetry) are better for your health than pulp fiction.
ONE
Early Days
1
The Girl Who Ate Books
On long road trips, I often dream of Kolkata, especially in the mountains when the air is thin enough to switch on the mind’s most vivid hallucinations. It is always the same dream. I am a child, young enough to be carried past the whitewashed walls where graffiti and political slogans ran from one end of a street to another, my eyes level with the spiky palm-frond tops of the letters. Sometimes I am in a car, looking out. But the feeling remains the same: of travelling through a city built in sentences and slogans, where rivers of words flowed through its lanes.
Each neighbourhood’s walls were allocated to political parties. The parar chele were the gangs of boys who ran each patch of territory, who lounged on the street corners lighting their cigarettes from the end of a burning twist of rope as the rains came down. As the muggy summer heat rose up from the cramped pavements, they saw to it that few walls were left pristine white or cream.
The calligraphy of the graffiti artists was superb, sometimes as beautiful as the brushstroked Bengali words that adorned posters and book covers. The hammer and sickle, the political symbol of the communist left parties, is the first punctuation mark I remember; also the bearded trio of Marx, Lenin and (fading into historical distance) Stalin. Sometimes the fragile framework of the Howrah Bridge sketched in black and green paint sounded a more wistful note. In my dreams, the walls and their words are alive and the black slashes and rounded stomachs of the Bengali letters undulate, pushing and shoving past me like crowds shouting worn, familiar slogans: ‘Amader daabi maantey hobe! Cholbe na, cholbe na!’ Our demands must be heard! This won’t do, this won’t do!
Later, as a student in the city, I grew used to the walls and took their chatter for granted; they were as verbal as the rest of Kolkata. You walked and drove among colourful and carefully calligraphed slogans, Bengali advertisements, as though the pages of magazines and flapping banners had been frozen in stone and brick, as if the city itself was a large, living, illustrated book.
Kolkata is a good city for walkers, for though the pavements are crowded and the flagstones broken, the traffic moves too slowly to cause much harm. It is crowded; people can’t help jostling you, yet when they push past, they are usually gentle, unthreatening. As students, we walked as much as we could, except in the monsoons when we waded through the filthy streets, honing a skill that was useful in much of India and absolutely essential in Kolkata—the ability to not think about the muck and tamped-down dirt that was as much part of the city’s texture as the floating butterfly skeleton of the Howrah Bridge was a part of its imagined, loved skyline.
We walked through street and maidan cricket and football matches. Intricate paper shrines would be constructed during World Cups and Eden Garden matches at the roundabouts and the intersections, honouring the small but powerful gods who really mattered, the gods of fours and sixes, of googlies and wickets.
There were some constants. The political graffiti was punctuated by the jhalmuri sellers perching their grubby, spicy, irresistible paper packets of stomach-churning, mouth-tingling goodness on stork-legged wooden contraptions. And always, on the pavements and on the stoops, if you looked up, on the long, low roofs, there were the silhouettes and shapes of men, reading. In the back lanes of the slums of Garia or Jadavpur, no one-room or half-room shack was so poor that its inhabitants could not afford books or magazines. Bengali publishers produced cheap paperbacks and clothbound books at ridiculously low prices.
In the lanes of North Kolkata, you would see these cheap books by the score, lying face down on a tin trunk that had been converted into a sofa in one of those open balcony-verandahs where metal railings protected the house from thieves and cast slanted diamond shadows onto the hot tarmac below. The pages were so translucent that on summer days, a man reading, his checked gamcha slung over his shoulder, his belly bare so that he could scratch it with greater ease in between short stories, could hold his book up to the sunlight and read two pages of text at once.
Women read too, perhaps as much if not more than the men, but, for some reason, rarely in public, except on the buses with the wooden seats covered in rexine where the mini-bus conductors sang out the names of stops as though they were rousing Bengali hymns: Shyambajaar, Grey Stritt, Beadon Stritt, Bow Bajaar, Bhictoria Hauze, ’Splanade. It was not uncommon for the conductor to read, too, and in the slow trams that clattered over the cobblestones, I once saw the driver rustle the pages of a magazine, turning them idly as the tram made its stately, inch-by-inch progress along the ancient tracks. He was pronouncing each word aloud, with wonder, as though these were the very first sentences he had ever read in his life, but when you listened carefully, he was only reading the report of a cricket Test match that had ended in a draw.
*
Of the two most distinctive Kolkata sounds I remember, the first is the clamour of the traffic roaring over Howra
h Bridge, counterpointed by the warning boom of the sooty steamers that passed on the river down below on their way to the rapid tugging treacherous tides of Diamond Harbour. The second was the clang of the gate to a red-brick house with green shutters that no longer exists.
The gate, a solid unbroken sheet of steel rattling over white gravel, was so heavy that it took some effort to swing it open or shut on the iron rollers, and in the monsoons, the iron track beneath rusted, making it harder to open. Cocooned inside, from behind the peeling green wooden shutters, we could hear the clang and the judder when guests or relatives arrived, the gate decanting more cousins, uncles, aunts and friends into the noisy, full world of my childhood.
My grandmother’s house on Rowland Road was set far back from the busy main thoroughfare where Kolkata’s buses juddered down Lansdowne Road, coughing and honking their complaints, and the gossiping clamour of car horns in the crowded lane outside. Inside the house it was cool and dark with the louvred shutters drawn, as they were every afternoon against the heat and humidity. The voices of adults above my head sounded like a flock of chattering parakeets as they went from the formal drawing room into the open verandah. The adults, and us cousins, wound in and out between the house and the garden; the separation between the two was indistinct, with three flights of stone stairs leading down into the lawn where a tyre swing hung enticingly from the mango tree.
In the years to come, through four decades, that would be the only house to lay claim to my imagination. (This was not from the lack of other houses in my life. From my parents, I have inherited a tendency of rapid and sudden jolts of movement from one rented place to another in the same city.)
It is as though living in the home my grandmother, Archana Roy, had created—gracious, warm, welcoming, the red stone floors polished to a high gleam by generations of old retainers, someone at the piano, and laughter or the strains of Radio Ceylon in the large, inviting enclosed verandah most evenings—had spoiled us for settling in a more permanent way anywhere else.
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