The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  Back in the 1970s, the house in Kolkata was the only fixed point for us, the children of this generation. My father was a government servant; two of my uncles were in the air force; all of us cousins were used to shifting from one government colony to another, one air force base to another, one city to another. For my mother, her sisters and her brother and their assorted offspring, the red-bricked bungalow in Kolkata with the green-shuttered windows and the vast garden at the back was an unassailable point of stillness and rest in lives where everything else was in a constant state of flux.

  We were just the children; we weren’t supposed to know about the ups and downs of family fortunes, about the generational migration out of Kolkata, about those perennial villains of the piece, Taxes and Rates. The odd bits of gossip that came our way as the first signs of a dying state economy and the waning fortunes of a thousand apparently unassailable families took their toll on those gracious, rapidly emptying and increasingly silent houses and were interpreted in our particular fashion. When we heard that the X’s family home was a perfect white elephant, we wanted to see the elephant in question: it seemed in character for a house that had hosted goats, cows and a mongoose in the past to turn now to elephant-keeping.

  One by one, all those white elephants vanished, along with the wind-up gramophone players on which the strains of the Andrews sisters or Harry Lauder or Ustad Allauddin Khan or Hemanta could be heard.

  It was on a sweltering day in June that walking down a road whose old-fashioned cobblestoned pavements I’d known all my life, I noticed the gap between two houses. The bungalow that used to stand in that space had seemed to be every bit as permanent as all our homes. I had played on its long, cool verandahs every year of my childhood, raided the book cupboards fitted under the stairs, had afternoon tea in the informal drawing room and dinner in the formal drawing room. The wrought-iron grills that had decorated the front porch lay like uprooted teeth in a dentist’s office; the foundation stone was all that was left, and a long, snaking line of workers, sweating in that merciless heat, would soon remove that, too. The houses on either side looked exposed, vulnerable; for the first time I saw the cracks running up the façade of one, the banyan tree roots that had taken firm possession of the wall of the other, the dark patches of damp and rot like sweat stains that pockmarked both.

  I must have been twelve or thirteen, and for the first time, it occurred to me that the uncertainties of life in Delhi or Bombay (or Bhuj, where my cousins attended a rudimentary school at the air force base) where your house was a shifting point on a grid that expanded or contracted almost arbitrarily, might have infected the changeless, sealed world of Kolkata.

  Decay was not frightening, or alien; we had all grown up knowing houses that had rotted from the inside out or outside in, we had seen the linen and the hangings fray at the edges just as the lives of the inhabitants unravelled, thread by thread. Pianos lost their keys, houses lost their music when there was no longer someone to place a hurricane lantern, the flame turned low, inside the Steinway to keep the strings warm in winter, dry in the monsoons. As the next generation left the city—the skeletal, graceful arc of the Howrah Bridge always behind us, never ahead—in search of better jobs, brighter opportunities, first one bedroom and then another, one wing and then an entire floor, were locked up or leased out. But the houses that I knew dwindled into shabbiness or revived temporarily under a new coat of paint, responding like terminal patients to all-too-brief injections of prosperity: they rarely disappeared.

  Over the next few years, as the landscape of the Kolkata I knew and had grown up with transformed, what made the new order particularly cruel was the pace of change. The construction crews in Delhi and Bombay worked with swift, brutal precision: old houses went under the hammer, new apartment buildings came up, a neighbourhood could be built, eradicated or reconstructed in the space of months.

  The lassitude and lethargy of Kolkata drew out the breaking down of one of those ancient bungalows with their strong foundations and their stone pillars to impossible lengths. The new buildings came up over a space of several seasons, not overnight. The slow, crawling pace at which these transitions happened gave everyone time they didn’t want and space they didn’t need in which they might assimilate what had happened to houses that had been occupied by three, four, five generations before facing the wrecking ball.

  We watched the houses on Rowland Road go, one after another. The new buildings towered over the few bungalows left; no garden had a hedge or a wall high enough to ward off the gazes of curious new tenants on the fourth or fifth floor. And the number of apartments that could be crammed into spaces which a previous generation had considered insufficient for a large family made any form of protest unseemly. Bungalows and mansions in a city as teeming with people as Kolkata were a luxury; just by living in them you were automatically stamped an enemy of the people.

  What the houses appeared to stand for was wealth, power, security, a kind of selfishness; the real histories of these houses could be harder to read. It could lie in the dark smudge on the ochre outside wall where a plaque had hung carrying the name of a Muslim doctor whose family had to leave their homes, their possessions and their identities behind during the Partition riots. It could lie in the monetarily worthless sketch of a typical rural Bengal scene that had been done by a great-grandfather who kept this over his desk so that he might never forget, in the rushing tides of the city, the village that he had come from.

  It could rest silently on the bookshelves, as our family’s history did to some extent.

  *

  These were floor-to-ceiling bookracks; to pull a book down from the highest shelves, you needed either a ladder or the custom-built cane like an inverted walking stick whose comma-shaped end hooked tidily around the tome you wanted. There were books that even the most intrepid grandchildren had never attempted to read, because they were written in languages that were inaccessible to us: Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic, Aramaic and Farsi, the languages a great-grandfather had learned, loved and cherished all his life. There were the legal books my grandfather, a lawyer and a judge, had amassed. These, too, we avoided. And there were the rest, the usual mishmash of volumes of Punch and The Decline and Fall jumbled in with ancient travelogues, Georgette Heyers and gothic novels, encyclopaedias and dictionaries of every stamp, the obligatory sets of Tagore, Saratchandra and other contemporary Bengali authors, and cookbooks that went from Bengali cuisine to Escoffier, Miss Beaton and Flora Annie Steele.

  No one knew exactly when Argha had started pilfering the books, but by the time we found out, the library had been sadly diminished. Only the front rows remained, and even there, he had skilfully spread out books to hide the gaps. If all of us had been living in Kolkata, he would have found the theft impossible; his raids were testimony to the emptying out of the house, the migration of families.

  In typically Bengali fashion, it wasn’t the theft that hit us hard—it was the fact that Argha had sold the books to kabadiwallahs, not to bookshops or book dealers. To lose our books to other readers, even if they were non-familial readers, was a bearable loss; to have those books converted into packing material or paper bags seemed untenable. Or so we said, and it was much easier anyway to mourn books than it was to mourn the passing of a house, or a way of life, or an era.

  In Kolkata, we took the presence of books for granted: every one of my friends, whether they lived in immaculate bungalows or crumbling cubbyholes, seemed to furnish their homes in paperback and hardback. Bookcases and libraries were part of the furniture, so much so that it never occurred to me to ask why we read the books, whether everyone who owned those books actually read them at all, and why we read the particular books we did. It was only when I came back to Delhi after my school years in Kolkata were over that I began to wonder whether those venerable, mahogany bookcases hadn’t become the enlightened intellectual’s equivalent of the small gods in the puja rooms that seemed ubiquitous in the capital’s homes.

  And my
reaction to some of Delhi’s houses was that of a true believer confronted with evidence of appalling apostasy. There were houses that had everything from Italian marble to Belgian crystal, French furniture and Kerala sculpture, but lacked two things: books and music. There were respectable, prim middle-class homes done up in imitation Ikea that boasted the wide-screen TV set, where books had never crossed the threshold and were not missed. It didn’t matter where these houses were located in Delhi’s complex social hierarchy: they all seemed faintly obscene to my censorious eyes, those living rooms rendered stark and unpleasantly naked by the absence of bookcases, of rows of 78 rpm records or carefully hand-recorded cassettes.

  What I was looking for seemed to be elusive in both of the cities that belonged to me, that I had claimed as my own. Kolkata enshrined its books all too often, and the worth of those books was often measured in their inaccessibility to those who might want to actually read them. And Delhi often replaced books with music, shayari, and references to an oral literature from a vibrant, living culture whose underpinnings I wasn’t equipped to even see, let alone judge.

  It was a stray visit to Sham Lal’s house, as a very junior cog in the wheel at a tremendously respected literary magazine, that helped me find my moorings. Stacks of new books, some still in their wrappers, waited to be read. His bookcases in the drawing room appeared to be constructed out of literature, the books so thickly layered that they took on the roles of dividers, book-ends and bricks rolled into one.

  The rooms breathed in a way I hadn’t seen very often in either Kolkata or Delhi; the silent compact they made with their owner was that they were there not to be displayed but to be read. Their pages would not stick together because the books were there to be riffled through; they would not fall prey to silverfish because they would be taken out of those shelves, read, and put away again. They would be dusted not as a domestic chore, but because any of these volumes might be needed for reference or pleasure at any given moment in time. The books would be lent out, discussed, argued over, read with pleasure and attention: they would not be allowed to die.

  Delhi’s bookcases began opening up to me at the same time as I developed an obsession with charting the death of Kolkata’s libraries. The readers I met in Delhi had tastes that were far wider than my own; they travelled a lot more, they were generous with their opinions, their books and their bibliographies. The conversations I began to have about books and reading and authors, in this city of ancient monuments and aggressively modern malls, took up from where the conversations in Kolkata had ceased.

  I was a fledgling reporter on the arts and books beat for a business newspaper when I married a fellow bibliophile, a man who had, like me, grown up in Kolkata and found home in Delhi. I felt rich when we moved into our first ‘married couple’ house, dizzy at the amount of space I would only have to share with one other person, after a lifetime of living cheerfully among siblings, itinerant aunts and uncles, cousins, stray guests.

  We were gifted a dining table, an almirah for clothes, an ornamental table, and some kitchen cupboards. The first furniture we bought were bookshelves, where we stacked my husband’s science-fiction classics and chess manuals, and my eclectic collection of Indian drama and poetry, and world literature and animal stories. Then we spent most of our wedding gift money on books; some weeks later when we realized that books were perhaps not the only essentials, we reluctantly set aside some of the book-money to buy a bed. The bed had inbuilt shelves, and these soon filled up with books, too.

  I began to meet writers and editors, and stealthily stalked them under cover of doing interviews for the paper for book recommendations. Macmillan’s former editor, Ravi Vyas, returned me to the Russian classics. Krishna Sobti reeled off a list of Delhi writers I should read, and I began buying affordable classics from Rajpal & Sons and Rajkamal Prakashan. For the price of one English-language 300-page hardcover best-seller, I could buy two books by Shivani, one by Kamleshwar, Ved Prakash Sharma’s Vardi Wala Gunda (a best-selling potboiler loosely based on Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination), and a Nirmal Verma novel. The late Patwant Singh gently pointed out the value of archives; often, it was the accounts of architects and the maps of civic planners that would reveal the true history of Delhi, a city that spent the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s endlessly reinventing itself, more even than political or cultural memoirs.

  I was too timid to ask K. Satchidanandan, the poet who was one of the stalwarts of the Sahitya Akademi, for recommendations, but he opened up the world of the cheap, affordable, well-produced screenplays and theatre scripts by Mahesh Elkunchwar, Girish Karnad, Vijay Tendulkar and other great playwrights that were sold at the Triveni Kala Sangam cafe. Kolkata had given me a past, grounded me in both the literary history of Bengal and the wider history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indian writing in English, but Delhi gave me another kind of heritage, equally priceless: modern India, in two languages—English and Hindi. It remains a source of sadness that I never learned Urdu or Persian, closing off one massive tributary of the past; perhaps some day I will repair this omission.

  *

  In my thirties, long after the house on Rowland Road had been demolished to make way for a block of flats, I have developed a habit as unbreakable and annoying as a nervous tic. For my generation, visits to Kolkata are almost ceremonial—the three-month vacations of our childhood days are just memories, it’s hard enough to snatch a week or a fortnight out of our impossibly crowded schedules. Scattered across different cities and continents, we make the pilgrimage back not for the house or the city any more, but for my grandmother, a woman who makes the eighties seem like an ebullient, enviable age to inhabit.

  ‘I’m in bed because I did something to my hip,’ she said in one of our long, leisurely phone calls. I could imagine her speaking into the bilious green rotary phone, surrounded by stacks of Mills & Boons and the pack of cards with which she played endless rounds of Patience when she was bored.

  ‘Did you fall in the bathroom?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said demurely. ‘I went with some of Mamu’s (her son’s) friends to see what Rock Around The Clock was like.’

  I should have known it was nothing as tame as the usual frailties of advancing age: in her early eighties, Didima used to drive her elderly Fiat with a ferocity that struck fear into the leathery, desiccated hearts of minibus drivers, pursuing those who had the bad fortune to cut her off down Lansdowne past the trams and the tram tracks. The expression on the face of a hardened Kolkata minibus driver who realizes he’s being followed, and fluently sworn at in Bengali, by a little old octogenarian lady, is beyond price. Then her eyesight started to falter, and she knocked the traffic policeman’s small booth over several times as she swung dashingly around the curve of Rowland and Lansdowne, but she was still aggrieved when the traffic department declined to renew her driving licence later that year.

  Rock Around The Clock was then the new disco at the Park.

  ‘Did you like the music?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes!’ my grandmother said. ‘They played all the old numbers, ‘Blue suede shoes’, ‘Love me do’, my kind of music. Then I thought I’d show your generation how to jive—tomra to naachte paro na, you don’t know what real dancing is—but they really aren’t polishing the floors right. Someone should tell them how to do it! We danced our feet off, until I slipped.’

  She lives in an apartment built in the block of flats, where the old house used to stand; it’s the same place, the same space, but we are now four floors up, and the view has changed. From her bedroom you could see the red-brick house that was twin to our own, now almost the last of its kind left on Rowland Road. It looks so small, so vulnerable, so exposed to the gaze of its neighbours in their five-and-eight storeyed towering blocks of flats; like the head of a balding man, you can see the crowns of the trees, the bare patches of pink cement on the roof.

  *

  Now, when I’m in Kolkata, there are always two places I visit: the second-hand booksellers on
College Street and Free School Street, and the auction houses on Russell Street. I go back to these places the way some of my contemporaries in Delhi subscribe to The Statesman: what we’re looking for is the obituaries.

  My family’s books died messily. My grandfather’s legal library fared the best, perhaps—his books were distributed among other lawyers and friends in the legal profession, at a time when it seemed that none of his children would follow him into the courtroom. No one had anticipated that my mother would earn her LLB at the age of thirty-nine; for years afterwards, she would open dusty volumes on the intricacies of constitutional law or the law of torts in some lawyer’s office and be surprised by her father’s seal and stamp on the frontispiece. Some of the children’s books were donated to school libraries years before Argha did his raiding. Though my niece and nephew will never see them, it gives me pleasure to think that other children might read them, and greater pleasure to know that The Little Engine that Could and Tuntuni were not transmuted into paper bags, after all.

  As for the rest of the books, the ones that survived the monsoons, the silverfish and Argha’s depredations had a harder time outliving the death of the house. My sister, my aunt, my mother and I salvaged a few volumes here and there, just before the symmetry of those open verandahs and those cool inner rooms was shattered by the wrecking crews. The rest of the books were packed carefully into custom-designed crates, dusted with borax and strewn with neem leaves, layered like coddled babies in plastic; despite those precautions, they didn’t survive. Histories, geographies, collections of books on Burma and the Indo-Japan war, the collection of biographies and letters put together by one of my ancestors, the first editions, the clothbound classics of Bengali literature decorated with unusually fine calligraphy, huge tomes on painting and architecture—I never read them then, I will never read them now.