The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  I think of him when I browse pavement bookstalls in any city. For me, the appeal of these books are the appeal of nostalgia: my childhood is here. Laid out in shabby covers, in colourful tempting heaps, on the pavements of one or the other of my cities, one copy of adolescence, available for a bargain price. I go through the piles, their dirt-stained, foxed covers, and an argument we often had comes back to haunt me. Could books and reading save your life?

  No, I had said; it was the love of living and the search for experiences that we could not have ourself that might save our lives, but being a reader in itself was insufficient. Yes, said my friend the writer who had never been able to finish writing his brilliant, original novel; a book had magic, the page had power, words were not what they seemed. When there were so many more books to discover, he said, which true reader would ever want to kill himself?

  (Written between 2003 and 2013.)

  3

  The Baba Yaga in the Back Garden

  The monsoons came early to Goa; I was leaving the beach when the sea went a flat grey and the clouds roiled up, and then I got off the bus and walked the last few kilometres drenched in the first rains, the paddy fields bending emerald, the coconut trees swaying almost all the way down to the road back to the house we were renting for a blessed year away from Delhi. At home, the rain is like another presence, a creature who raps at the windows and rattles the tiles, and over the next few weeks, I will understand why people love Goa—the frangipani trees grow in front of my astonished eyes, the birds of paradise bloom and shoot up overnight, as though the garden was a magical garden, planted with magical seeds, like something out of the old fairy tales.

  I have been trying to write in a house with blank whitewashed walls and a high, sloping roof made of burnt orange Mangalore tiles. This is the only house I have lived in that has no books or bookshelves in it. I meant to bring them from Delhi to Goa, but then the writing started, shakily and clumsily, and the books stayed in their cartons in the other city. Nor did I put up paintings or posters, though I had meant to do that too.

  The bare walls strip me of the history and memory that is contained in three decades of collected books. This is not a bad thing.

  Freddy has to be evicted every afternoon; he is a young, excitable frog in a beautiful shade of red, and he blushes crimson when he is chased out of the bathroom, out of the bedroom, chivvied out of the corners of the dining room onto the Jaisalmer golden yellow steps that lead down into the garden. Today, when I open the creaking wooden doors, struggling with the heavy black bolts, and make the usual ushering gesture in his direction, Freddy shrinks back into his corner, blending in with the extravagantly patterned crimson-and-black floor tiles. It is raining so hard, like something out of a broodier, more ancient fairy tale, that I give up and let him stay.

  I start writing, line by line, and the story snakes away from me, so that it has to be wrestled back onto the page each time; it is a good story but a muscular one, hard to manage or control, and like a rider out on her first gallop, I don’t yet have the skills needed to steer it. It will be an outtake in the end, but one of the mercies of writing is that you don’t know until you’re done what will stay and what will die, thrashing and writhing, bogged down in the mud of your beginner’s inadequacies.

  The blankness of the walls in this large, welcoming, half-empty house is therapeutic in a way working out of a library or someone else’s home could not emulate. The books at home have defined me as a journalist for many years now. I am the person who is interested in gender, and food, and travel, beautiful design, women’s histories, the secret lives of animals, in imaginary places and imaginary cities, etc etc etc.

  But here all of that can fall away, and other things can emerge. I am wrestling with the snake’s tail, trying to hold the end of the story flat on the page, but it rises up again and again, unwilling to be fixed in position. The middle of the story is the wrong shape, which is why the end is not working. I should go back and fix this, but there is that lack of skill: you cannot hope to change a car tyre with a painter’s brushes, or use a garden spade to sand down a wooden cabinet, but that is what I have been trying to do all day.

  When I look up, there is only the rain and the neighbour’s many cats peering in curiously, their paws cautious as they pay me furtive visits, and the darkness of the garden. Twilight falls and the blood-red floor of the verandah goes black in the shadows. The empty walls give me nothing that will tell me who I already am, and slowly, I begin to reach for another, unguessable, hidden writer self.

  Then there is a miracle. I am standing at the door, listening to the rain, wondering abstractedly why night has dropped down so fast, not realizing that seven hours have passed since I sat down at the dining table to write for five minutes. The falling night made me get up, to switch on the lights; the garden is alive with soft scurrying sounds and the whirring of small insect violin-players, and the ants who live between the champa trees and a corner of the kitchen have marched in for the night in their neatly punctuated lines.

  When I turn back to the dining table, the pages I have been wrestling with rise up and shake, violently, fluttering like baleful, enchanted leaves. One sheet of paper shoots off the table. One lands at my feet.

  One launches itself straight upwards, into the air, and behind it is the red flash of Freddy. He is probably bored after a day spent sitting quietly in the corner, and he wants to go out, but I am in his way, and he is growing frantic because having leapt on the table, he is lost in the thicket of papers. No matter how high he jumps, one of the sheets jumps with him. It is stuck to his frantic backside, and I have to reach into the air and twitch it off the frog in mid-air. Freddy hops out into the night, a flash of red caught in the pool of light, beautiful against the yellow stone, and then he is gone.

  In the kitchen, the ants have left a wordless message for me: the poi, fresh-baked that morning by the village bakery next door, and the home-made mackerel pate I had intended to have for dinner, have been picked clean, which is exactly what I deserve for leaving good food out on the counter so carelessly. There are only seven reproachful crumbs left on the plate, but skipping one meal, or two, in the middle of the plenitude of Goa, is no hardship.

  I go to bed hungry but replete, the way you are when a day’s writing has been done. It is like being a novice gardener. Humility comes with the territory; the bulbs you plant so haphazardly may never sprout, the branches you prune so clumsily may wither and die, you pull up the good shoots by the roots along with the weeds. But it is still a grand way to spend a day.

  At three in the morning, the windows slam and I hear the unmistakeable sound of roof tiles shattering. It seems to me that there is a scraping at the eaves, and in my sleep, I think muzzily, ‘I am alone in this house, and I don’t know many people in this village.’ There is a moon so full that it shines right through the clouds blanketing its surface, bright and hard and merciless, illuminating the black, moss-and-creeper covered garden walls, the spiky branches of the coconut palms in the unlived-in house next door.

  I hear the scraping at the eaves again, and then a shadow races across the surface of the moon, so fast that I barely have time to catch my breath before the scraping, khir-khir-khir, begins again. Lying in bed, listening to the rain hammer down hard, I reach out and touch one of the bedposts for comfort, noting that a spider has built a fresh web in a corner high up near the stained glass windows.

  Outside the window, the shadow looms closer and closer, and forms into a curious craft, large, as ominous as a submarine, but shaped like a bucket, a pestle.

  I know the pilot. I haven’t seen her since my childhood, but every wrinkle on her formidably competent hands, the power she radiates, that calm, unblinkered, terrifying gaze, the crone’s streaming white hair, flying like a battle flag in this storm identifies the Baba Yaga.

  The winds pick up, tearing at the gap in the roof made by the broken tile, widening it; water pours in and I hear its distant splash on the kitchen
floor. The lights are out, the power lines down, but moonlight bathes me and the Yaga in a bright, hard, pearly glow.

  She crooks a finger, curling it in my direction. Her eyes are hooded, and I cannot see the expression on her face. But I get up, casting aside the sheets, and walk towards the window, hesitating for only a second before she steers her craft down. It is easier to get into the pestle than I had thought it might be, like stepping into a compact river boat. Her dry hand steadies mine, she turns once to make sure that I have settled, and then we rise high up into the night skies, flying so fast that I am dizzy with fear and exhilaration. Her white hair streams out like a banner, and I clutch on to the sides of the pestle, watching my home in Bastora drop further and further away, shrink as we go higher and higher, all the way up to the moon and beyond. There is nothing about this that does not feel absolutely, frighteningly real, from the rough grain of the wood that the pestle is carved from, to the cool searing touch of moonlight, very close up, on your face.

  The winds whip past us, leaving my cheekbones frozen and raw, and I grip harder as the Yaga flies over the rivers, above the storm clouds, hovers at the edge of the sea, and then, faster than I could have imagined, she has looped her craft around and we are flying back, down, diving deep into the heart of the clouds, emerging with heartstopping suddenness at the edge of the roof of the sprawling Bastora house. The pestle is made of an old dark wood that thrums as we fly downwards, towards my bedroom window. The Yaga turns, slowly, and I see that she has raised one bony finger to her beautiful mouth.

  Together, we look in through the window, the Yaga and me, the rains soaking her hair and my clothes through.

  I am looking at myself. I am fast asleep on the bed, undisturbed by the storm, though I stir uneasily from time to time whenever the roof tiles rattle.

  The Yaga is watching me. If I show unease or fear, she will let me step out of her pestle, and go home to join my sleeping twin on the bed.

  I meet her eyes, and the moonlight falls sharp and cool on our faces. I gesture to the moon and the clouds: up, please, can we go up again?

  We can.

  The next morning, there is nothing of the Yaga, not even a white hair left on the old wooden windowsill, but there is a wide gap in the kitchen roof that has to be patched while Freddy hops around, offering froggy advice.

  The story from yesterday is beyond fixing. But in the few months I’ve spent in Goa, something in me has yielded, some idea of writing perfect paragraphs and stories has dissolved forever. One morning the week before, I had stepped into the bakery next door to see that the poi was ruined; the oven had overheated and the brown crust had scorched into black. The poder had been up since four in the morning to heat the oven and get the dough ready, but he offered me and other friends in the village little pillows of pav instead, shovelling the burnt poi into a tin pail. ‘Sometimes I feed humans,’ he said cheerfully, ‘but sometimes it’s the turn of the pigs to get lucky!’

  I mentally consecrate the ruined story to a passel of pigs and the Yaga’s voice whispers to me that nothing is wasted, nothing is meant to be taken so seriously. I type a fresh sentence, and it isn’t a complete mess; then I type another, and soon the paragraphs start to march across the screen like well-behaved ant armies again.

  Writing is like that. You never know what is going to happen next, and once it does, however strange it might be, you move on to the next thing that is leaking or damaged, in need of fixing or your attention.

  *

  Growing up in Delhi, our house was one of a cluster of identical, whitewashed, sarkari bungalows perched at the rim of Safdarjung airfield. In the 1970s, Delhi was far from being the megalomaniac megapolis it is these days. Gurgaon’s high-rise gated communities were as unimaginable as the idea that you might own a telephone that was not Bakelite, rotary dial and available in black, green and black, or be able to talk to people in other cities whenever you wanted to, without waiting for hours for your Demand or Lightning Trunk Call booking to come through. The sullen concrete slab of the Akbar Hotel, built in 1965, and the geometric spheres of Pragati Maidan, built in 1972, were about as dazzlingly experimental as the city’s architecture would get for a long while.

  It was a sleepy, friendly city before the Emergency years, not yet swaggering, not yet surly, and in many of its government and timidly burgeoning private colonies, not yet dangerous. In high summer, when the noon sun felt scalding to the skin and the roads shimmered with mirages, families spread bedsheets out on the lawns at night and watered the grass so that we could cool down from a day spent inside concrete houses.

  The lack of air-conditioning was a given in most parts of the city, driving people outdoors, and contributing to an atmosphere of relaxed, unsuspicious community. My aunt and her neighbours in Model Town, one of the city’s typically optimistically named new colonies would go up to the roofs instead. Summer had a sound to it: the muted airplane-propeller roar of air coolers, lined with real khus, blared in every middle-class home, scenting the heat and dust.

  It would have been a sign of decadence—a quality Delhi would embrace joyously, but in a much later era—to leave air coolers switched on in the mornings. As their fans slowed and whirred to a halt, we would hear a different, more urgent blare, the batabatabatabata of pilots in their gliders and fragile stunt planes taking off at Safdarjung Airfield from 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. onwards, lacing the sky with their aerobatics.

  I was about seven then, and on the weekends, me and my friends would sometimes get up early to race down to the road that abutted the airfield, just to watch the planes take off and land like giant metallic bulbuls and hoopoes. One of the most daring pilots, the one who flew the lowest over our roofs, divebombing the treetops, was famous: Sanjay Gandhi, the prime minister’s notorious son. We were only children, but we knew he had something to do with the Emergency, which spread its rough and inky fingers into everyone’s lives. The Emergency was why everyone’s parents seemed strained, afraid, and why conversations at the adults’ parties had become staccato, taut.

  Children have an acute sense for what is not being said, and that was what the miasma of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency spread. It was a time when people spoke too carefully, and we, listening from the back verandahs, heard the choked-off words in their strangled, silenced voices.

  I was just five or six when the worst excesses of the Emergency years happened. That time is mixed up in my mind with fearsome stories about bulldozers that went crazy and knocked down people’s houses for no reason at all, and the vanishing of certain citizens, including people we knew. It felt as though the city had started eating its own and spitting them out at the borders and the edges of what had been familiar, comfortable, unchanging Delhi. One of my father’s friends gave me The School by Arkady Gaidar. It had been written in 1930, and was an interesting take on Russia through the eyes of schoolboys in the small village of Arzamov. In this passage, the narrator and his friend Fedka are on their way to see a column of Austrian prisoners-of-war. The narrator is wondering what kind of crimes a person has to commit to be a prisoner, and asks Fedka why their teacher at school was arrested unexpectedly, with no reason assigned.

  We ran, Fedka and I, till we came to the ravine. Here my curiosity got the better of me and I asked Fedka: ‘No really, Fedka, what was the teacher arrested for? All that talk about being a spy and a highwayman is bosh, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Fedka said, slowing down and looking round cautiously, as if we were in a crowd instead of a field. ‘He was arrested for politics, my dear chap.’

  A while after this incident, the narrator comes across a book that interests him greatly; its subject is revolutionaries, and nobody in Arzamov speaks of revolutionaries. ‘Everything in these stories was the other way round. The heroes there were people the police were after, and the police sleuths, instead of arousing sympathy, provoked only contempt and indignation.’ It made sense, as if Gaidar had been Indian instead of Russian.

  On the radio broadc
asts, those who spoke with the most assurance seemed to be permanently angry. The government issued brisk, cheerful songs that had an undercurrent of menace and nightmare quality to them: ‘Kachra hatao!’ the government’s voice sang briskly, cheerfully, and more houses were demolished, more Delhiwallahs shifted out like garbage to unwelcoming, arid colonies called Wellcome and Sunshine.

  I was greedy in my reading then, scanning everything from newspapers to buses for words. So I remember the Emergency as a time of whispered bad news, and exclamation marks: ‘The Nation Is On The Move! Emergency For A Stronger More Prosperous Future!’ One of the slogans in particular was unsettling and, to my six-year-old self, accusatory: ‘You Too Have A Role In The Emergency!’ These slogans were painted on auto-rickshaws and buses; they surrounded you every time you stepped out of the house.

  Sanjay Gandhi’s name was whispered in the markets of Sarojini Nagar; rumours swirled around him, some true, some false. Some speculated that he tore down the homes around Turkman Gate because he wanted to build a revolving restaurant called Sanjay Minar; some said he hated the poor and wanted them blotted out of Delhi. Shopkeepers were sure that it was because of him that officials offered tins of ghee and transistor radios in exchange for The Operation. I thought of him as an ogre, literally, because of simple confusion: they had said in the markets that Sanjay’s day at his office began with sterilizations. Unfamiliar with both the processes of birth and of birth control at six, I imagined that Sanjay Gandhi’s daily routine involved some arcane form of surgery (and quantities of boiling water). It was not true, but it was not that far from the truth either.

  *

  But for a child, living in Delhi was freedom in a way that is unimaginable now. Emergency or no Emergency, our house teemed with friends and relatives who wandered in for a meal and stayed, sometimes for days and weeks. My mother has an effortless natural warmth and a gift for making people feel at home; my father loves parties, dancing and gatherings. One parent couldn’t help collecting strays; one parent couldn’t resist collecting raconteurs. We had a full house, always.