The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  In the afternoons, all the neighbourhood’s children were turned out to play, like tumbling puppies, so that we would not get in the way of mothers (there were no stay-at-home fathers, none at all), cooks, household staff and grandparents during the day. We played in each other’s gardens, and climbed from the champa and neem trees up on to the garage roofs, and marched along like miniature kings and queens of the back alleys. We stole mulberries off the trees, and were free to roam all the way from the road along Safdarjung Airfield to the perimeter of Chanakya Cinema.

  The Chanakya Cinema Complex was a no-go zone. Chanakya screened dreary family films in the evenings and racy films in the mornings, consigning vice in the shape of B.R. Ishaara’s Chetna and horror—Aur Kaun? and other effusions from the Ramsay Brothers—to office-going hours. Yashwant Place was equally off-limits. Because of its proximity to the Russian Embassy, it had sprouted shops in the 1970s called Magazin Dhzoni and Yasha. The shopkeepers still speak Russian (and Arabic); the shops sell furs, leather jackets, will exchange roubles, provide samovars and condoms with the names printed in Russian.

  This was not what gave Yashwant Place its sinister reputation: that came from its proximity to the building where Aeroflot had its office, and where India’s intelligence services were rumoured to take their suspects for interrogations. It didn’t matter whether these rumours were true or false. The malign fog of murmured half-truths lay like a thick fog over the Chanakya Cinema Complex for years, until the family restaurant Nirula’s came up, adding its home-made, Indian-style pizzas and burgers to the dubious but tasty momos sold by homesick men from Dharamshala.

  We kept to the other side of the neighbourhood, boldly exploring the roads and roofs and treetops. My sister and her friends made a magic geography of the place, to which I added my own favourites. Captain Teach and a pack of pirates hunted each other with cutlasses down the back lanes, near the railway lines. Tuntuni, the storytelling bird from Bengali children’s classics, had a neat nest in a large mulberry tree that doubled as the Faraway Tree from Enid Blyton’s books. The jackals who howled every night were really the foxes and wolves from Olga Perovskaya’s Kids and Cubs. Boo Radley’s house lay across the airfield, roughly where the current prime minister’s home is situated, and the feathery pash stalks concealed Bibhutibhushan’s Apu and Durga, running out to see the train go by. In one corner of the sugarcane field (where we were not allowed to go for fear of snakes) if you pushed deep into the stalks, you would see: big broad gnarled chicken feet, a lowering hut with the chimney smoking, a black cat draped across its threshold. Inside the hut, the Baba Yaga lurked. We knew she was there, imported all the way from Russia into our world.

  No one dared to go into the sugarcane field to check whether the Yaga was really there. But one day, we pushed in past the dry rustling foliage far enough to see something old, wrinkled and gnarly on the ground. They might have been peepul tree roots. We said they were the chicken feet of the Yaga’s hut and fled as fast as we could before the old witch could come out and gobble us up.

  *

  Meanwhile, I wanted a wolf, but I thought it best to work up to this gradually, given that my mother’s hospitality was matched by her temper, which was sometimes frayed by the number of unexpected occupants she was expected to provide for. My sister had asthma, which meant that we couldn’t keep animals in the house. But I optimistically smuggled in assorted baby pigeons, kittens in distress, and on one occasion, a lost child who needed rescuing.

  This last episode didn’t work out very well, because the child was neither lost nor in need of a rescuer (I had been reading too many Enid Blyton stories where children ran around the countryside, doing good in an annoying sort of way), and resented being forcibly rescued. He was a small boy, about three years younger than me. He had been stowed away in the carrot patch in the back garden while my friend Rohit Ranjan and I held a summit meeting about his future.

  Our cook, Harilal, found the little fellow before my mother heard his plaintive wails. Harilal and I were good friends, and I took most of my stray animals to him. He helped me hide and feed them, and then he would quietly smuggle the creatures back out, keeping both me and my mother happy. But he was slightly taken aback by our latest acquisition.

  ‘What have you done? Where did you find this fellow?’

  ‘He was lost!’

  ‘I’m not lost! My home is right there, down the road! They made me come with them!’

  Rohit Ranjan explained to Harilal, ‘He’s confused. The trauma of getting lost has addled his brains. We should keep him in the garage.’

  The boy burst into tears.

  ‘See?’ said Rohit. ‘I told you he was confused.’

  Harilal, unimpressed with us, asked the boy to stop crying, gave him a toffee, and took him back home.

  Foiled, I went back to the house and read Kids and Cubs for the seventh time, end to end. But this time, I was on a mission, treating Olga Perovskaya’s beautiful stories about the animals her family rescued and looked after in their Alma-Ata home as a shopping list. I crossed deer off the list on the basis that my paternal grandmother had briefly kept one and was jaundiced on the subject: ‘Our deer used to head-butt people. And we had to clean up after her. All the time. Worse than a baby!’ That reminded me of cows, and cows and I had an inimical relationship. One of them had shown an unnerving amount of interest in me when I was three, and I had not liked being backed into a corner, blowed on and then licked by an over-enthusiastic bovine.

  Worse, Perovskaya’s Mishka ate paper, and cigarette butts, and then sheets, and dresses, and finally holy pictures. He ate the legs off a picture of St. George and the Dragon: ‘His gaze then wandered to The Flood where he greedily consumed both saints and sinners. He merely tore Adam and Eve Driven From Eden off the wall and tossed them to the floor.’ I decided a deer wouldn’t do.

  Then I wanted a tiger cub, just like Vaska in the book, who was afraid of the dark and ‘very polite to the dogs’—but Vaska also chewed up brooms ‘because he was getting even with all the brooms in the world’. And Perovskaya offered a warning: ‘Though he was still very small, he wasn’t an ordinary creature, but a tiger, and we would have to seriously consider his likes and dislikes.’ Horses sounded nice, but the stallion in Kids and Cubs spent a lot of his time running away, and I wasn’t sure whether our handkerchief lawn was large enough to accommodate both a horse and my father’s friends, who liked to sit out in the evenings.

  The story that made me cry the most was about two wolf cubs, Tomchik and Dianka, whom I loved, long distance, from the moment I read about them sitting ‘side by side on the threshold of the smithy, looking out into the yard, feeling hurt and lonely’. They would often eat a lot, and if they overate, their bellies would blow up, and they’d have to lie down and crawl about, rubbing their tummies on the grass. I bullied the children next door into lying down and crawling about like wolves for months and months until they were sick of the command: ‘Play Dianka and Tomchik.’

  I cried when Tomchik was shot by the neighbour, and when Chubary the stallion had to be put down, and when any of Olga Perovskaya’s animal friends disappeared or died, and then I would pick up the book, tears streaming down my face, and read it from the beginning all over again.

  I had a plan about the wolf adoption. I would persuade my mother to say yes to having a puppy, a kitten or a rabbit, who could all (theoretically) be confined to the back garden so that my sister wouldn’t need to be hospitalised with one of her asthma attacks. Then once my mother was used to the idea of a puppy frolicking around the house, it could be cunningly substituted with a wolf-pup, which was after all just a hairier dog. Patiently, I tried to persuade my mother that puppies were excellent companions and that we needed a guard dog: ‘For robbers.’

  But my mother was atypically tired that year. She had malaria, and then some odd disease where she began to swell up like a pumpkin, her joints so greatly thickened that it was hard for her to drive the old black Ambassador a
round. That Ambassador had a centaur-like bond with her. WBA 2 responded only to her touch, its engine balking and gears jerking if anyone else tried to drive the car.

  Despite her ailments, it wasn’t in her nature to be despondent. She worried in fits and starts about her mysterious affliction, and then she would forget all about it and rush around throwing parties or taking the neighbourhood’s children off in the big black Ambassador for some excursion or the other.

  Then one of my dreams came true, but in a horrible way: an animal did enter the house, a black cobra who wrapped itself around my grandparents’ clay water pot. My Thakurda got up at night for a drink of water, and some instinct stopped him from touching the pot. If he’d found a snake in the house today, we would have called the wildlife department and the snake would have been captured and released elsewhere. But in those days, it was the sad fate of snakes to be chased out or killed. I was dreadfully sorry that it had been killed, even if cobras were poisonous; a nest of them lived at the bottom of another friends’ garden in the colony, and I thought they were kindly, graceful souls, their black whiplike shapes waving gently at us from a discreet distance.

  Thakurda insisted on taking Ma to the doctor the next day for a check-up, because of the shock to her system. It turned out that she didn’t have elephantiasis, and that she wasn’t dying; the swelling was caused by the incipient arrival of my baby brother. My mother was nearing forty, and had ruled out pregnancy as a possible condition on the grounds that she was too old to get pregnant. I was delighted at the news, and relieved; it seemed to me that it was a lot easier to get my parents to accept a baby brother than it would have been to get them to accept a baby wolf.

  My brother smiled a lot more sweetly than I imagined a baby wolf would when he arrived. He also ate a lot less than wolves did, and wrapped the neighbourhood around his tiny fist with his air of being absolutely delighted to see anyone who stopped by his crib. Though, to my slight disappointment, he didn’t rub his belly on the grass when he had had too much milk.

  *

  The Soviet books arrived in gigantic shipments; in 1970s India, thanks to the import laws, books were the one luxury people had. Consumer goods could not be imported into the country freely, which is why Indians of that generation had the most bizarre food fetishes: for Kraft’s cheese cubes, or for tinned pineapple, or for slabs of Toblerone. White goods—refrigerators, even steam irons, glassware, ordinary kitchen mixer-blenders—were also not available easily, perhaps because they were seen as corruptions of the West. First citizens would clamour for a fridge, and then who knew what perversions they would demand?

  But books, for some reason, could be imported, and the Soviet book ships sailed often to our part of the world, outdoing the missionary ships that came in loaded with Bibles and the Lives of the Saints in lurid colours.

  In 2013, when I published The Wildings, a saga about cats, cheels and other animals set in Nizamuddin, many interviewers asked about influences.

  ‘Richard Adams’ Watership Down, Kipling’s Jungle Book, Olga Perovskaya’s Kids and Cubs, The Three Fat Men by Yuri Olesha,’ I’d say.

  And the interviews would come out dutifully mentioning Adams and Kipling, but blanking out the Russians. It was not the fault of the interviewers. They had started reading in the 1990s and the 2000s, and they were completely unfamiliar with the Soviet authors. They hadn’t grown up singing the cosmonaut song from Victor Dragunsky’s The Adventures of Dennis: ‘On the dusty paths of the distant stars/Our footprints will remain.’

  The big distinction between Soviet children’s books and Enid Blyton was simple: the former were more real, while Blyton fell into the realm of fantasy. The world of the Five Find-Outers (and dog) or places like Sunnymead Farm were as exotic as Tolkien’s orcs and elves, and as remote to our experience. The muffins, scones and ginger beer could have been fairy food in that decade—dwarf bread was as foreign to our experience as the concept of a ‘scone’ in a country where cakes were either Britannia’s sliced monstrosities or were flat, homely objects baked in a tin over a coal oven.

  There’s a passage in The Adventures of Dennis where Dennis’ friend lists all the food he likes—fried liver, meatballs, herring, split-pea soup, green peas, boiled meat, caramels, salami, anchovies, salmon, pickled pike, catfish in tomato sauce, sardines, sugar, tea, jam, soda pop, seltzer, borsch, boiled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, and even raw eggs, and halvah. It was a thrilling mixture of familiar, everyday things—meatballs, peas, sugar, tea, eggs, halvah—and foreign objects, from pickled pike to boiled meat and borsch. It sums up the lure of the Russian books for me—so everyday, like the trials and obstacles the children go through, but with just enough of the unfamiliar to spice the reading.

  When I asked friends—many of them now writers and publishers—for their memories of Soviet books, it was like opening the floodgates. If you lose a political and trading connection with a country, as India did with Russia, you also lose part of your personal memory. At the hundreds of literature festivals sprouting like dank mushrooms across the country, there are no panels on The Three Fat Men and their influence on our political nightmares, Bulgakov or Arkady Gaidar’s impact on our writing styles, no self-important papers on The Influence of the Soviet School on Indian Writers of X Generation. And yet, we remember it well.

  Annie Zaidi—playwright, poet and novelist now—wrote to say: ‘One thing that distinguished the Russian books from other kiddie books I saw was that they were more real, more everyday. I had never seen a book where the illness and pain of a small child was at the heart of it, its raison d’etre. Silly stories about daddy’s childhood being an escape, and the father’s helplessness in the face of pain—this was very rare. It still is. Too many kids’ stories are about superheroic qualities or adventures, which is a sort of fantasy too. And now, even the fairytales are sanitized to remove all traces of real pain.’

  Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, now a novelist and celebrated blogger, remembered Galina Demykina’s The Lost Girl and the Scallywag, about a girl who discovers she can walk into a painting made by her grandfather. Salil Tripathi, human rights consultant and non-fiction author, was given a birthday gift at the age of ten—a set of Tolstoy’s complete stories translated into Gujarati. The editor Sonal Shah’s grandfather brought back books from China—the illustrated children’s version of Journey to the West, books like Dreams of Red Mansions and Mao’s poetry. ‘There were also picture books for smaller kids that were basically the communist party propaganda version of the “Good Indian Boy” charts,’ she wrote.

  Benjamin Zachariah, now a scholar and academic, remembered the man who used to sell Soviet books door to door. ‘I was in Presidency College, in my second year, when the Soviet Union came to an end.’ Arunava Sinha, the translator and writer, recalled the book ships quite clearly, and Indrajit Hazra, writer and journalist, directed the nostalgic to a Soviet books showroom near Hedua, close to College Street in Kolkata with caveats (‘not for the fainthearted’).

  Many remembered the science books—Physics Can Be Fun, the Yuri Gagarin autobiography—along with the more frightening books. Documentary filmmaker Bishakha Datta’s memories of the menacing shadows-and-spies world of The Three Fat Men were as strong as mine. The editor Simar Puneet wrote about Albert Likhanov’s The Maze, with ‘bleak and beautiful illustrations by Yuri Ivanov—the first book that made me feel like a grown-up’.

  And then Kavitha Krishnan, gender activist and politician, dug out a page from Kids and Cubs online, and wrote: ‘But the nice memories are a bit spoiled now learning from Wikipedia that the author spent a long time in a labour camp post-1943.’

  I froze in mid-post and stared at the screen, images tumbling through my head—the line drawings of Olga Perovskaya and her sisters, ‘four little girls in red hats’—and thought of how badly I’d wanted to meet Perovskaya, to thank her for the magic of Kids and Cubs. The Internet gave me meagre details. She had been arrested in March 1943, and sentenced to imprisonment during the Great
Purge. The sentence had been commuted to exile at some point, and she had been released in the mid-1950s. Her books had not been published for ten years, though she was eventually rehabilitated.

  I could not find out which camp Perovskaya had been sent to, but Anne Applebaum’s matter-of-fact descriptions of the Soviet gulags in the 1940s are fearsome. ‘The word “GULAG” is an acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration, the institution which ran the Soviet camps. But over time, the word has also come to signify the system of Soviet slave labour itself, in all its forms and varieties: labour camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women’s camps, children’s camps, transit camps,’ she wrote in an introduction to The Gulag Museum.

  I think often of Perovskaya’s years in the labour camps. She must have broken frozen ground along with the rest of the Russian families caught up in the jaws of the labour camp machinery, walked for hours every day to put in another nine or ten hours of work, survived the bedbugs, the small and distinct kicks, blows and other cruelties of the guards, slept on the bare planks in that freezing cold, eaten meagre soup from those battered tin plates. She died in 1961; she was fifty-nine years old.

  *

  I lost my fear of the Baba Yaga gradually but surely. It was replaced by something that I was too young to recognize as envy. The Yaga was wise, if curmudgeonly, but it seemed to me that anyone would be short of temper if uninvited princesses and Vasilisas insisted on dropping in without notice. She had her own property in the shape of a mobile hut; her own high-speed, very cool transport.

  She was not afraid of displaying her wrath or behaving badly, or eating the odd annoying person, all qualities that I secretly envied because I was so often told that displaying your anger and having tantrums were not ladylike things to do. I did not want to be ladylike at all, but between the nuns at my convent school and a battalion of aunts, it was thrust upon me. The Yaga fascinated me. She had wisdom, which is distinct from intelligence, and she drew her formidable power from sources other than youth, beauty or charm, which made her a quirky role model for a young girl.