Treasures in the pages of books
Other day, I was cleaning my bookshelf. Its another form of meditation for me. Picked this hardbound fat copy of Sacred Games (its an old copy and the book cover doesn’t have pictures characters from Netflix series, it actually has hand-painted and most befitting personification of those characters). I flipped through the pages and found a dried leaf. I looked at it and instantly knew what it was. A memory etched in my brain but pushed deep down. The leaf was picked up from a road while standing under the tree waiting for a company shuttle. It was something a colleague was leaving behind with me before moving out of country. We stayed in touch but I had forgotten about the leaf. The book held it close. That book was a gift from him and we had spent hours discussing the story and characters. While the book is a story of Ganesh Gaitonde and Saradarji, for me, it also holds my own story. The story I and my friend created.
That’s what I love about the books. They are not just the story that we read in those pages. They hold a larger story. A story that I was experiencing while I was reading the book. Places where I carried the book, people I met during the times I read the book, offices I worked during those days, music I listened to over the days the book was being read, food I ate — all of this gets added to the book. That’s why every book is my unique experience.
After our wedding, we traveled through Himachal mountains alongside Bias river. Carrying my fat copy of Sense and Sensibility. To-date when I open the book, I feel cold mountain air on my face.
My copy of The Godfather was bought from streets of Fort. On page number 178 of that book there is a yellow stain of haldi. When I saw that I suddenly felt such strong sense of connection with the previous reader. Did she too love reading while eating? Did her mother scold her for that? Did she attempt cleaning that stain or she let it be (like I do) .. (and I have always most definitively felt it was a ‘she’) A lot of my childhood books have small spots of Ghee because my favourite childhood book-time snack was soft, ghee laden Besan ke laddoo. Other time, I was reading a poetry book in a used book store. One line read ‘Love is carefree’. A Previous owner had changed that line by striking off some words and adding a few of his. It now read ‘Love ought to be care+free’. For some reason I felt it must be a man (may be because men in my life have loved me by offering me care and freedom). I kept looking for more clues in the book to know something more about him. And then stopped, closed the book and kept it back. I knew enough about him already.
