The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  From the bedroom, I heard my mother’s voice. The adults would soon be up and about, the lid of the piano would be raised, Didima would play Scott Joplin or old Tagore songs, maybe Mamu would go from jazz to Simon & Garfunkel, and the house would rumble with laughter and chatter; and in the middle of all of this, I would be discovered for the miserable gnawer of books I now knew myself to be.

  With trembling hands, I did what I had to do. Ripping out the page, I ate the telltale shreds inside the book, and then, piece by piece, I ate the entire page corner to corner. Then I quietly returned the book to the shelves, pushing it all the way to the back, and joined the household for tea, a little subdued. My conscience was troubling me, and so was my stomach, though this would hardly be the last time I would find the printed word difficult to digest.

  (Written in 2009 with additions in 2014.)

  2

  Finding Dean

  It happened several years ago, on the road from Edinburgh to London. It had been a magical week of writers—Harold Pinter, Arthur Conan Doyle, Irvine Welsh, musicians and Qigong enthusiasts doing their thing on the streets, an afternoon spent with no one but the seagulls, a chance encounter with an Irish doctor who showed me around the Canongate and told stories about his favourite writers the way other people tell stories about their favourite aunts, some apple-and-cheese lunches, jazz one blustery night near Arthur’s Seat, and then it was time to leave Edinburgh.

  The Norwegian mime troupe who’d offered me a ride in the van hadn’t bargained for the double bass player who had hooked up with the driver. I said, no problem, I’d make my own way back to London. The flights and trains were too expensive, so I booked a bus ticket, and from thereon, everything—naturally—went wrong.

  The wheels on my suitcase locked, so it had to be dragged and carried down the street. It was a grey, drenched morning. ‘Here, luv, ’av an apple on me, you’re too early for breakfuss,’ the lady at the desk had said kindly when I was leaving the hotel. But the apple and my tiny cache of spare cash had disappeared through a hole in the lining of my coat by the time I wrestled the suitcase into the bus.

  The bus was packed; two hours into the journey, I woke to find the guy in the seat next to me breathing his halitosis—stale beer, fried fish—into my face; when we stopped at a gas station, the loos had been pre-puked in by the previous busload.

  Both the Edinburgh Festival and London were indulgences I couldn’t really afford, even with the generosity of the British Council, which had sprung for the cost of air tickets and the stay in Edinburgh. This was a rare treat for the small band of Indian reviewers and authors who had been invited to see what the fuss over the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the writers who massed at Charlotte Square Gardens was like.

  This was 2002, four years before the Jaipur Literature Festival kicked off in Diggi Palace, inaugurating festival fever in India. Most of us book lovers had spent the 1990s with our noses pressed up to the thick-glassed window that separated home and abroad, knowing that if you lived in India, you would rarely meet the foreign writers whose books you loved so much. As a fledgling book reviewer at the Business Standard newspaper in Delhi, I couldn’t believe my luck when the British Council made the offer of a scholarship.

  My husband and I did some frantic calculations—he had just quit his job in order to kickstart a career in freelance writing, and we had just spent the year’s furniture allowance on, predictably, books—and worked out that if I was very sensible, I would be able to afford meals in Edinburgh as well as a few days in London, if I cast myself upon the charity of friends.

  It was a common dilemma: book reviewing didn’t pay much, though few of us in the profession minded. Perhaps it had been foolish of me to try to squeeze in a trip to London, but it had been irresistible. Who could possibly come so far and not visit Daunt’s, imagine the streets where Charles Dickens had taken his brisk, long, restless walks, try to see the city through the eyes of the generations of Indians who had visited and sometimes settled in, from unknown, unnamed convicts and labourers, to Dean Mahomet, Toru Dutt and closer to our time, Salman Rushdie?

  But in the bus, five hours into the ride, I was miserably hungry. It was only genteel starvation, but I’d blown my cash in Edinburgh on music tickets and books and had skipped meals for two or three days. This was a common problem for the small group from India—all of us went a little crazy when we saw the abundance of books in the stores, compared to the relatively thin stacks back in Delhi, and we went unwisely, but so deliciously, from famine to feast, spending far more than any of us could afford.

  London was an indulgence, I knew that right from the start, but it’s only at this point that I’m wondering if I made a big, big mistake. Broke, cold, wet, miserable, hungry, sleepy—perhaps I should have just gone back home.

  That’s when Leaflet Boy appears.

  He’s young, probably in his early twenties, a thin, brown-skinned figure wearing too large spectacles that he has to keep pushing up his nose. He’s standing at a corner watching the slow progress of traffic and offering leaflets with a grave, courtly gesture to Londoners who clearly couldn’t give a damn about him or his leaflets. I don’t know how long he’s been standing there, handing out leaflets no one wants, but his eyes are watery in the wind and his cheeks are blue with cold.

  I know it’s rude to stare, but he’s such a small, brave, pathetic figure. I’m about to look away politely when he catches my eye and waves.

  The bus has stopped in traffic. I’m at the window; I’m sure he’s waving to someone else, so I look around instinctively.

  He’s smiling now. He waves again.

  At me? I’m confused.

  He points a finger in my direction and sketches a wide bow. Yes, you.

  Tentatively, I wave back.

  He puts a hand on his heart and sketches an even lower bow.

  Hello! he mimes.

  I smile, uncertainly.

  He draws a huge smiley face with a flourish in the air.

  Cold! he mimes, shivering exaggeratedly.

  This I can do. I mime ‘cold’ back with absolutely no trouble. I’m guessing this is just a brownface meets brown-face encounter.

  He does a complicated mime. He smiles, jumps up and down, waves to passers-by.

  The pedestrians hurrying by seem startled at the antics of this skinny exuberant kid.

  I’m puzzled. He mimes again, sketching an overcoat in the London air and jumping on the spot again: if you smile, wave, jump and down, flap your hands, it makes you feel warmer. Then he bows, a big extravagant bow.

  I start laughing. By now, others in the bus are beginning to grin at the kid, wave to him. And people on the street aren’t edging past him; they’re stopping, briefly, turning around to smile at the loony Indian kid.

  The bus starts up again. Leaflet Boy looks sad, but only for a second. He crumples one of the leaflets deftly, working fast, shaping it into a rough paper rose. Puts it between his teeth, puts his hand on his heart, gets down on his knees and starts singing. ‘Musafir hoon yaaron . . .’ It’s a cracked, adolescent voice, and the old Kishore Kumar song grows fainter and fainter until it’s lost in traffic.

  Soon I can’t see him. In the bus, people go back to sleep, rustle their papers, look for mints, stretch and get back to their individual cocoons of silence.

  I never saw Leaflet Boy again, and we probably wouldn’t recognize each other if we met on the street. But over the next few years, I travelled a lot, and each journey brought its own adventures: lonely roads, unsafe trains, fleabag hotels, muggings, magic, great meals, strange pilgrims, the works. This was the first time I’d travelled abroad alone as an adult, though, or experienced a small sliver of what it might be to feel a little lost in a strange country, and I send up a small prayer of thanks for Leaflet Boy. As I wrestle the giant Third World suitcase with its many extension pockets, inadequate zips and that classy pre-ripped look off the bus, I know that no matter how often I travel in the future, whether i
t’s coach or first-class, I’ll never be welcomed as warmly, as gloriously, to a city as Leaflet Boy welcomed me to London. Bless him, wherever he is.

  *

  Writers adopt writers. As with chefs and artists, this is a kind, warm-hearted community, given to opening their homes to friends and strangers without reservation. The strangeness of being abroad disappeared in the warmth of the house of Ruchir Joshi, Gita Sahgal and their two boys, and as I leaned against the kitchen counter, listening, their conversation washed over me in comforting waves. It switched easily from politics, the history of the Southhall Black Sisters, public radio, to quick sketches of mutual friends, most of them writers or filmmakers or human rights activists. The boys, bright, confident, outgoing, helped with dinner.

  These gifts—the boys’ instantly extended friendliness, Ruchir’s home-cooked food, Gita’s tactful tips for getting around London—were priceless, and immensely reassuring. I had not realized until they made me feel so welcome in their home that I had been feeling so out of place, an awkward, first-time traveller who didn’t even know how to press the right buttons on the Walk/Don’t Walk signs.

  In Edinburgh, confused by the buses, afraid of taking the wrong one and squandering the fare I’d set aside for the day, I’d finally walked back to the hotel in the falling darkness, trudging along unfamiliar streets for some hours in a complex blend of trepidation and exasperation at my helplessness. The independence I was so proud of back home in Delhi seemed to have been left behind at the UK Customs counter, leaving me awash in drifts of small humiliations of my own creation.

  My passage to England was so unlike the swashbuckling approach of a man I had started to adore, across the passage of centuries. I wished I had half the resilience of Sake Dean Mahomet, the first Indian writer to attempt a full-fledged book in English and the intrepid founder of first a coffee-house and then an unabashedly Orientalist spa in Brighton.

  *

  Saik Deen Mahomad, manufacturer of the real currie powder, takes the earliest opportunity to inform the nobility and gentry, that he has, under the patronage of the first men of quality who have resided in India, established at his house, 34 George Street, Portman-Square, the Hindostanee Dinner and Hooka Smoking Club. Apartments are fitted up for their entertainment in the Eastern style, where dinners, composed of genuine Hindostanee dishes, are served up at the shortest notice . . . Such ladies and gentlemen as may desirous of having India Dinners dressed and sent to their own houses will be punctually attended to by giving previous notice . . .

  The Morning Post, 2 February 1810

  Dean Mahomet was an enterprising young man who grew up at the height of the rule of the East India Company, coming out of Orissa after one of its great famines. His portrait startled me when I saw it. He has a contemporary look about him, an air of competitive alertness and enterprise. It’s a blend of the determination of young UPSC aspirants from Patna with the business minded Marwari boys I grew up with in Kolkata, who stuck to their family businesses but loved a dashing start-up story.

  Mahomet wrote his Travels as a manuscript-length visiting card: he would use these memoirs to pry open the world of English patrons, setting himself up with unabashed shrewdness as an explainer of India:

  As you may not understand those terms, I shall thus explain them to you.

  Comedan signifies – Captain

  Subidar – Lieutenant

  Jemidar – Ensign

  Howaldar – Serjeant

  Homaldar – Corporal

  Seapoy – Private soldier

  Tombourwalla – Drummer

  Basleewalla – Fife

  Trooheewalla – Trumpeter

  The ‘Travels’ are often read only by academics, because of their slightly repetitive style, and because of Mahomet’s over-careful eye on the English patrons whom he hoped to please. The first Indian writer in English wrote explicitly for a foreign audience, probably plagiarized his recollections of India and life as a Company man from a variety of sources, and committed the (present-day) cardinal sins of Explaining India and omitting the authentic India. He mentions the famine, and brushes it aside; his patrons will not be interested, he intuits, in the sufferings of Indians. (Mahomet was quite correct; in Mookerjee’s Magazine, a popular periodical of the 19th century, one of the most controversial articles was a running series on the great Indian famines—written, the author explains, to correct the British silence on the subject.)

  The critic Amardeep Singh writes: ‘It must have taken a considerable feat of the imagination for an Indian, however curious and intrepid, in that day and age to consider writing in a foreign tongue, in an age when one’s country was observed and the observations set down almost exclusively by outsiders.’

  Mahomet’s subsequent career would have been of great interest to an Indian audience, but this pioneering desi writer had discovered for himself the sad truth of publishing—the local audience for his travels, Indians back home, didn’t exist in numbers sufficient to make it worth his while.

  And yet, as Amardeep notes, his story might have been a classic of early immigration. There is nothing that tells us how he felt when the ambitiously named Hindustani Coffee House failed, or whether he missed the monsoons, walking in Ireland’s damp and London’s grey fogs, wondering whether he could set up his own practice as a specialist in Oriental medicine. He did; he made a startling success of himself as a ‘shampooing surgeon’ in Brighton.

  But having explained bhishtis and oliphaunts, he is silent on how he felt when he married his Anglo-Irish wife, whether he mourned the coffee—served South Indian style, by the yard, or in contemporary style, by the dish?—he had served at his Hindostanee Coffee House, whether he missed India’s heat and dust, or preferred the placid hedgerows of the English countryside, the Brighton pavilions.

  A year after Mahomet had tried his hand at providing fine Indian dining for patrons, he switched tack—perhaps because most old India hands and well-heeled Indian visitors to England imported their own cooks to make the rich curries they craved, and had no need to outsource banquets and biryanis.

  Hindostanee Coffee-House, No. 34 George-street, Portman square-Mahomed, East-Indian, informs the Nobility and Gentry, he has fitted up the above house, neatly and elegantly, for the entertainment of Indian gentlemen, where they may enjoy the Hoakha, with real Chilm tobacco, and Indian dishes, in the highest perfection, and allowed by the greatest epicures to be unequalled to any curries ever made in England with choice wines, and every accommodation, and now looks up to them for their future patronage and support, and gratefully acknowledges himself indebted for their former favours, and trusts it will merit the highest satisfaction when made known to the public

  The Times, 27 March 1811

  Reading these lines today, I admire his ambition—Dean Mahomet was aiming higher than you would guess. Coffee houses were not the equivalent of today’s cafes; they were a cross between the addas of Kolkata, informal versions of gentlemen’s clubs or New York nightclubs, and which coffee house you patronized said a great deal about your politics, your interests and your social standing. In John Timbs’s history of London’s coffee houses, he charts their bumpy start: in 1657, James Farr, a barber-turned-owner of a coffee house, was called up at St. Dunstan’s, for instance. The charge against him was that ‘he annoyeth his neighbors by evil smells’, incurred in the making and selling of a drink called coffee. Moreover, his chimney had a tendency to catch fire, to the understandable ‘affrightment of his neighbors’.

  Just two decades later, these minor inconveniences had been tempered by familiarity, and Timbs includes a song from Jordan’s ‘Triumphs of London’, 1675:

  You that delight in wit and mirth,

  And love to hear such news

  That come from all parts of the earth,

  Turks, Dutch, and Danes, and Jews:

  I’ll send ye to the rendezvous,

  Where it is smoaking new;

  Go hear it at a coffee-house,

  It cannot
but be true.

  There battails and sea-fights are fought,

  And bloudy plots displaid;

  They know more things than e’er was thought,

  Or ever was bewray’d:

  No money in the minting-house

  Is half so bright and new;

  And coming from the Coffee-House,

  It cannot but be true.

  By 1715, there were two thousand coffee houses in London. The National Review had a description of how they functioned, which sounded a lot like the reminiscences I’d grown up with in Kolkata, of the equally popular addas where the intellectuals and thinkers of the day presided over discussions fuelled by kabiraji omelettes and endless cups of tea. London’s coffee houses were divided by profession, trade, class and political affiliation. The lawyers had their favourite haunts near the Temple, the ‘young bloods’ patronized more fashionable places where they could drop in after theatre.

  I was delighted to learn that it wasn’t just the lawyers, the artists, the journalists and the ‘Cits’—the bankers and stock market brokers of the era—who gathered over a cup of coffee; parsons went to Truby’s or Child’s. ‘The gamesters shook their elbows in White’s and the Chocolate-houses round Covent Garden,’ the National Review writes. ‘And the leading wits gathered at Will’s, Button’s, or Tom’s, in Great Russell-street, where after the theatre was playing at piquet and the best of conversation till midnight.’

  It was a surprisingly familiar scene. Starting work as a journalist in Delhi, I had been puzzled by the city’s lack of Kolkata-style addas until one of South Delhi’s more seasoned troupers explained the city to me. In those days, civil servants and lawyers frequented the Gymkhana Club; journalists huddled over cheap and endless pegs of rum at the Press Club; old Punjabi Partition-era families went to the Chelmsford; the Golf Club (notorious today for its steep membership fees) was home to golfers, but also diplomats, dashing businessmen and rising politicians. Artists and activists preferred the more humble Triveni Kala Sangam, rising to the dizzy heights of The Cellar when they were in funds, and intellectuals had long since stormed the Bastille of the India International Centre, where everyone under fifty was considered young and you had to be a septuagenarian to command any respect.