The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  In the large echoing spaces of the auction houses, I find families who share something—a look of disbelief, a sense of awkward comedy: can this really be us, selling off Dadua’s charcoal drawings and Didibhai’s collection of china cats and shepherdesses at a pathetic Rs 1,200 or Rs 800 to the highest bidder? There are soup cups decorated with mushrooms and hand-painted leeks; Murshidabad brass; a rash of Jamini Roys, real and fake; glass, cut-glass, blown glass; dessicated ships in dusty bottles; black-lacquered hurricane lanterns; chandeliers too large for most contemporary ceilings; ancient box cameras and pinwheel cameras that still, miraculously, work; rosewood sideboards and politically incorrect elephant’s-foot umbrella stands. The whispered histories of these items are obliterated in the auctioneer’s crisp prose: Lot no. 12, assorted glassware and a picnic basket, Lot no. 15, a dancing Nataraja, two Tagore sketches (provenance unavailable), a lady’s sewing basket and three scrapbooks. Sometimes there are books, though not often; often, however, there are pianos and harmoniums, their silent ivory keys deepened to golden-yellow with age, and sheet music, brought in by the sackful, sold by the sackful.

  *

  For the books you must go elsewhere. Standing at the second-hand booksellers on a winter afternoon, I watch as a family brings in the books that haven’t been donated or distributed. The mother is calm, matter-of-fact; she haggles over the final price in the same way that she haggles over vegetables and packets of camphor at the Park Circus market. An elderly gentleman—father, uncle, cousin, who knows?—cannot tear himself away; he returns to each pile, nervously sorting through them, separating the cookbooks from the travelogues, trying to alphabetize each small stack. The booksellers watch him wryly. As soon as he leaves, the books will be reorganized, not by genre and author so much as by condition, the rainspotted ones with fragile, crumbling pages tossed aside regardless of content, the ones with pristine bindings and clean pages, which were usually the ones least loved and read in their lifetime, taken to the top of the heap. But they allow him this last, fumbling farewell.

  *

  The weeks blend into months and years, and I begin to see a pattern. It seems to me that every family selling its books contains at least one collector, one eccentric, one person whose passions were allowed to dominate a small corner of the family library. Butterflies and roses, the art of soap-making and steam engines, histories of the Raj and biographies of Indian women pioneers, treatises on lovemaking or flower arrangements, miniature paintings or modern art: every human passion seems to find a final destination here, on these pavements, to be weighed, assessed and priced. One family brings in a collection of books devoted only to the Himalayas; one family brings in a library of long-forgotten hunting, shikar and wildlife tomes. They hover, they haggle, they smooth pages absentmindedly; the booksellers will perform the last rites, the truly final ones, only after they leave, in much the same way that attendants at a crematorium begin their true work only after the mourners leave.

  I want to tell them what I know: that you cannot bring the house or the people you have loved back once they’re gone, that every childhood must end, and that no carefully preserved collection of dolls or child’s cooking utensils or books will return you to that time.

  I want to tell them about the Great Eastern Hotel. A friend, Ruchir Joshi, whose next book is set around that legendary establishment, browsed its archives and came back with photographs. Papers and diaries, letters and telegrams, dance cards and handwritten place settings line the corridors; you have to walk over the yellowing, blackening pages of history in order to locate the little that’s left. Paper mildews and tears; books rot or, as with many of the manuscripts in Kolkata’s National Library, desiccate until nothing is left, until a page will literally crumble at a touch. In some corridors of Kolkata’s libraries, the private and the public ones, so many books have dried out that to browse the stacks is to set off small explosions of dust: you don’t read the words, you inhale them.

  But I stay silent. We saved the strangest things from our house. A winding, wrought-iron staircase, unmoored without anything to hold up, followed my sister reproachfully from one rented house to another. Somewhere, on a cassette played so often that the tape is now unspooling, is a recording of one of the last times my grandmother and my uncle played the piano in the old house. The notes sound different in that large drawing room, as they move from ‘Take five’ to Rabindrasangeet to ‘Don’t fence me in’ and ‘The lambeth walk’. We saved iron grilles from the windows, and huge glass Mason jars; and yes, we saved a few books.

  I suppose everyone needs the small grace of hope. Everyone needs the rituals of dispossession as much as we need the rites of possession. We need to docket the china and give it away, to number the paintings and affix handwritten labels containing their history on the backs of the frame, we need to give the family books away to libraries, to friends. Even when you sell entire collections testifying to the curious passions of the past to a bookseller, what you hope is that something of these books, these passions, and the people who housed them for a time will endure.

  As for me, I don’t know what I hope to find here, in the booksellers’ caverns that smell of dust and mould, in the auction houses that smell of despair and loss. I have turned my back on so many things: on the house I grew up in, on Howrah Bridge, on Kolkata. There is nothing to regret: all of us now have new homes, new cities, new friends, new books threatening to grow into new libraries. But somewhere in these two places, the auction house and the secondhand bookseller, in the histories of the people who come here with their possessions and leave with small but precious cheques, is something I wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else. I have no exact word for the feeling that brings me back to the auction houses: a comfort derived not from nostalgia, but from a growing acceptance that the past is over. As families come and go, as the crumbling piles of books are evicted from their homes, weighed and sold to strangers, I feel a reassuring sense of kinship with those invisible readers from the past. On the rusty iron scales, the booksellers place the old books in one metal pan, and along with the heavy stone weights, the memories of readers and their collective booklove swings the balance down on the other side.

  (Published in Seminar, 2006, as ‘Rituals of Dispossession’.)

  2

  Booklove: The Pavement Booksellers

  This man would have preferred not to be named. He was once one of the brightest writers of his generation, but that was before certain cosmic signs convinced him that three different world governments were beaming interfering radio signals into his brain.

  He lived in a barsati, a two-room island moored in an ocean of a roof. It was my job to coax a column out of him every month for the magazine I worked for at the time. The columns were always brilliant, crisply written, eminently sane, but getting them out of the writer depended on two factors. One was the family of crows whom he had befriended. Some days, he’d shake his head sadly and announce, ‘They’ve been cawing today. Bad caws. Ominous. I can’t do it.’ And that would be that, I’d just have to return when the crows said it was safe for him to go ahead.

  The second was whether he’d bought books that week. The writer preferred to do his book buying from Delhi’s pavement bookstalls, both for reasons of economy and because he thought they offered him a more eclectic range. In weeks when he’d brought back a good haul, he was ebullient; he offered tea, conversation, biscuits—and columns. ‘But where do you keep the books?’ I asked once, looking around the flat. Its furnishings included snake skeletons, dried herbs, mannequins, an impressive collection of knives, but only two bookcases, and those overcrowded. I had begun believing that some of his talk of book purchases belonged to the same realm as the KGB radio station that beamed Russian versions of ‘Achy breaky heart’ into his head at 4 a.m.

  ‘Move to that side of the sofa,’ he said, pointing. He yanked the Kashmiri rug off the side I’d been sitting on, and there it was: a sofa constructed of the spoils of his book-buying expeditions. Ther
e was a geological feel to them. The lower strata consisted of early buys, the results of relatively uninformed trawls through Delhi’s Sunday book bazaar in Daryaganj—paperback Steinbecks, second and third rung nineteenth-century British Indian authors, odd tomes on ayurveda and herbal lore. The second strata indicated a shifting of sensibilities: rare and hard-to-find books on the railways, travelogues of fascinating aspect, anthropological works, half-forgotten histories and literary curiosities you would see now only in the catalogues of some Indian libraries.

  The topmost layer was more current, exposing the writer’s growing fascination with technologies old and new and with the minutiae of life in British India. As we sifted through the pile, the writer’s voice sane and cool as he explained the relevance of each find, the ‘sofa’ diminished until there was no space to sit but the floor.

  I had been trawling the pavements of Delhi for years in the grip of a hopeless fascination with books and reading. College professors, librarians and bibliophile friends had often been my companions, but this writer, teetering on and sometimes going over the crumbling edge of depression, was opening up a world I had never seen before. Most book lovers in Delhi, he explained, sneered at the pavement booksellers of Connaught Place, the ones whose stock seemed to consist entirely of roadside tourist attractions—backpacker’s guides, the latest bestsellers, a few Indian stalwarts (A Suitable Boy, Kama Sutra). But the thing to do was to rummage through the stacks at the back; that was where you often found out-of-print science fiction classics—works by Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick’s more obscure novels, old copies of those classic science-fiction magazines, Locus and even Astounding, sometimes graphic novels.

  Today you can buy the entire Sandman saga in Delhi’s bookshops or Joe Sacco’s Palestine, while Art Spiegelman’s Maus is practically mainstream; Fact & Fiction in Vasant Vihar used to stock a decent science-fiction selection before it closed down in 2015, and most bookshops will, at the very least, have science-fiction anthologies and authors like Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny and company. But this was in a decade of book parsimony, when any science-fiction past the ABCs—Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke—was a precious, rare find. I listened to every word the writer had to say; he was offering me a road map to booklover’s heaven.

  The Daryaganj booksellers, he continued, acquired most of their stock from Simla’s legendary secondhand bookshops, which in turn had successfully raided most of the old British Indian libraries. So what you got was waterstained Alistair MacLean, third-rate pulp fiction, useless tomes on how to make soap. It was still possible to cherrypick, to find unusual books on heraldic devices or old locomotives. A generation later, browsing on rare book websites, I would recognize some of the books among the writer’s collection, selling for exorbitant prices on eBay and other auction sites—not that he would ever have sold his books, not the ones he read and re-read, at any rate.

  But the most interesting books, he said, were the ones that the Daryaganj sellers had bought off the old private Delhi libraries, books and manuscripts that had emerged from the dusty trunks and disregarded bookcases that littered houses in Old Delhi’s twisting lanes. I remembered what he’d said, that throwaway aside just before he’d shovelled the books back into place and reconstructed his sofa, this year, when a national mission for the recovery of manuscripts sent researchers fanning out across India. In Delhi alone, they collected rare books, long-lost manuscripts, badly preserved histories, tattered but restorable treatises and ancient dictionaries by the sackful from just that one area.

  *

  My friend’s maps allowed me to explore worlds of reading, but it did more than that: as the writer’s directions led me down one mean street after another, as his instructions sent me exploring pavements and books I had never encountered before, I finally claimed Delhi as my own city. It was a claim I had resisted; my adolescence had been spent in Kolkata, my reading habits had been formed by that city in the 1980s. When pocket money was plentiful, I did my shopping in the grand manner, buying Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in three juicy handsome volumes at Bookworm. When, as was more often the case, my pockets were to let, my friends and I weighed the relative merits of kathi kabab rolls versus books. We usually sawed off somewhere in between—a jhal muri instead of a more expensive roll, plus College Street, where cynical booksellers weighed us with their expert eyes, found us wanting, but genially tossed a few odds and ends our way.

  Rajuda knew us best. One of my friends would be sent to the Ayn Rand-Richard Bach-Linda Goodman corner. There was one who wasn’t allowed to buy any Jibanananda until his reading soul had been fortified on an eclectic diet of modern Bengali short stories and Wislawa Symborska’s poetry. And Rajuda got me right between the eyes, scoring a perfect bull’s eye, when we met for the first time. I was looking for Trollope or some such novelist; he shook his head and said, ‘Markej podecho? Borjez podecho?’ I had read Marquez but not Borges. ‘Aajkaler generation!’ he said, dismissing my entire generation of raw readers, and started me off on a lifelong affair with Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar and company, through the medium of Latin American short stories.

  These were our addas, these crowded narrow pavement stalls, these cubbyhole shrines to books with their soot-blackened walls and their knowledgeable, cut-throat proprietors. On College Street and on Free School Street, there were clear divides separating the ‘technicals’ from the ‘paapular’ from the ‘aantel’, a word that could mean ‘intellectual’ or ‘pseudo-intellectual’, depending on vocal emphasis.

  The technicals catered to IIT and medical students and also did a thriving line in recycled textbooks—their counterparts in Delhi infested Kamla Nagar near the university to the point where other varieties of pavement books were hard to find. The ‘paapular’ were infinitely flexible: they sold pirated versions of every best-seller, local, foreign, self-help, bodice-ripping, crime fiction that you could summon to mind. In Kolkata, ‘paapular’ books also included locally translated versions of James Hadley Chase (where Miss Blandish became Blandish Memsahib) and later, Bangla versions of John Grisham, J.K. Rowling, Dean Koontz. One stall advertised ‘Wodehouser daarun golpo’ (‘Wodehouse’s excellent stories’) in large flowing Bangla calligraphy, Blandings Castle transferred to Bardhaman, Aunt Dahlia rendered as Dolly Mashima. In Delhi, ‘paapular’ covered the seedy world of Hindi ‘Pondies’—originally printed at Pondicherry Press—where, where Bhabhijis bartered unthinkable favours to collect a suitable dowry, and action thrillers, where Inspector Vinod fended off villains by the score and rested from his labours in the laps of busty but chaste young women.

  Bookshops were cathedrals, hymns to the ordered world of literature, where genre fiction and classics never shared the same space. Pavement bookstalls were satsangs, full-scale melas where every god you worshipped, from Nabokov all the way down to Danielle Steele, was available—you just had to find the right high priest.

  In bookshops these days I meet old friends, we make arrangements to catch the latest film festival together, we discuss the NYT best-seller list and the shift of editors at the Paris Review or Granta and the newest IWE wunderkind. It’s a lovely way to buy books, but sometimes my feet tap out a different rhythm, and I find myself rummaging through the mangy lot of books at PVR Priya, arguing with the man at the JNU bookstall over the merits of Javier Marias versus Flaubert, eavesdropping on the teenagers sharing two cups of smoky chai between eight people.

  These shabby, dilapidated stalls are where I first met back issues of The London Review of Books and where, nostalgic for Kolkata, I bought copies of Desh by the score. Under the flickering light of hissing petromax lanterns, I found Bulgakov and Baldwin and Gordimer, Alice Munro and Alice in Wonderland. These are the places where, under patched tarpaulins, my generation bought Beatles albums and Madhubani paintings along with their books. The pavement bookstalls recorded a different kind of history: the flood of Russian children’s books, folk tales and Lenin and Marx biographies at the peak of Indo-Soviet friendship, the wav
e of piracy testifying to the blandness of the new best-seller, the shift as backpacker tomes targeted first Russian, then American and Japanese and now Israeli tourists.

  *

  My friend, the writer, lost his battle against the demons living in his mind; they took over in the manner of illegal but persistent squatters. He disappeared from the circle of friends—editors and fellow writers—who had tried to help him in one way or another, slipping out of our lives little by little. The years passed and we had scant news of him, and then less, and then none, and finally there was only a stark, belated, heartbreaking update from a member of his family.

  He had deliberately sought quarrels, vicious fights where this essentially gentle soul, who knew all the squirrels, crows and mynahs on his terrace by their character traits, took care to speak only the most unforgiveable, searing words, with the closest of his friends. With those of us who were not so close, he had an easier time of it. You stop returning phone calls. You don’t open the door when people knock. You stay off email. The city’s brisk pace, their busy lives, their own struggles to become writers after the years of being readers: you can slip from the grasp of the people who admire you and who worry about you so easily, not falling through the cracks so much as receding from view, until finally, some two years after the deed, we heard that his demons had won.

  I remembered a long summer afternoon, on a day when his mind had been gentle on him, and the personal radio station that had tormented him had been muted for a few days. He had made innumerable cups of tea, and talked about the books he had loved with the kind of intensity that other writers reserved for reminiscences of the lovers who had marked them. ‘What I can’t stand about life is the living of it,’ he said at one point, and then he returned to an analysis of Herodotus versus Antony Beevor as military historians.