The Girl Who Ate Books Page 2

  We were exceptionally lucky to have the house and the gift of its many graces; it took me time to see just how much of a gift that kind of spaciousness was in a city as crowded and teeming with people, as dogged by poverty, the ghosts of famine still alive in my grandmother’s stories. It took a lot of effort—almost none of it expended by the families who lived in these mansions—to keep the many graces going, too: a small army of staff was required to polish the silver, and the wooden banisters, and keep the cobwebs away, and the roofs tiled and waterproofed, and the napkins starched, and the serried rows of books sorted and free of dust. We were lucky indeed, though neither my mother’s generation nor mine had done much to earn their good fortune.

  All this was the product of the hard work of the previous generation, many of them rooted in village life until they came out to the cities to explore the opportunities of a new, modern age. One ancestor, Bidhan Chandra Roy, had borrowed money from an Armenian family he was close to in order to fund his education as a medical student in the UK. He had returned to a changing India and made a name for himself as a doctor who was also, like so many in his time, immersed in the new Freedom Movement started by a lawyer from South Africa called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

  My grandfather, Subimal Chandra Roy, had died relatively young, but he had made a career for himself in the law. Between him and my great-uncle, they had left the next generation a sizeable, unearned inheritance, but no one understood estates, taxes and other such practicalities.

  Many Bengali families were similarly ornamental and utterly useless, and the fortunes that one generation had worked so hard to put together rushed upon inheritors like flood waters, receding in time, leaving the unwary marooned in the muck of crumbling houses and unpaid taxes, bewildered by the loss of what they had not earned in the first place.

  But for a child unaware of the tangled politics of class, or the pride mingled with resentment that the bhadralok—the gentlefolk—commanded, the red-brick house was a sanctuary and a haven. As a toddler, I loved being there, wobbling around in bare feet, dodging the commands of parents and an assortment of uncles and aunts, seeking its unexpected gifts. The pleasures of that house were mysterious and personal to each one of us, like the softly lit light fixtures that hung like warm globes from black lacquered iron chains suspended from painted wooden beams. These small surprises mattered more to me than the obvious graces of company and fragile china, the solid comfort of the Burma teak furniture.

  Staircases, for instance: there was a winding one in the ‘tower’, a tiny stone column that led off one of the bathrooms and had a separate, elvish door nestled among the mango trees outside. The stairs to the roof were steep and grey and ominous, like the crumbling ones inside the minarets of the Qutub Minar in Delhi that make the undersides of your soles curl in fear that you will fall. The tower had narrow slits for windows, where I dreamt of the archers of the Mahabharata and of Robin Hood’s merry men, often mixing up the two bands of brothers.

  Inside my grandmother’s bedroom, small, snug, the branches of the grapefruit tree tapping at her window in the morning, there was a flight of precarious stairs behind the desk where she kept her hisaab kitaab and the daily expense accounts, all written in her neat, cursive hand.

  The stairs led to the wonders of a tiny attic stuffed with papers, old trunks and other junk. Once, during one of our many jaunts, we found a bowl of painted mangoes, bananas and apples, all carved out of wood. The paint had peeled on the pink apples, the bright yellow bananas, but we had read enough fairy tales by then to know that the bowl of fruit was magical. We kept the bowl a little apart from the miniature cane doll’s house-furniture and the copies of Abol Tabol and Bugs Bunny comics, as though its magic, whatever form that took, might be contagious. And at the back of the house where the gutters added a layer of acrid guano to the air—if you woke up to the strains of birdsong from the jamun and mango trees, some sort of payment was due—a wrought-iron staircase like rusted lace curved up the length of the house. My sister kept that staircase for years after the old house had finally come down.

  There was one more thing about the Rowland Road house, though it seemed unremarkable at the time. It was built of books, or rather, the bookcases streamed across the house; the window alcoves had fitted bookcases, the staircases had book cupboards built under them, and it was taken for granted that every room would have either wall-mounted bookracks or standalone bookshelves.

  There was nothing unusual about this; most Kolkata homes were furnished in books, regardless of the size of the house or the income of the owner. The ones large enough to have furniture ‘sets’ and antimacassars ran to full sets of Bengali classics, from Saratchandra to Sharadindu, Jibanananda, Mahasweta, Bankimchandra and co. to Parashuram, Nabarun Bhattacharya, Bani Basu, Moti Nandy. The only assured constants in these homes would be the Holy Trinity of almanacs, back issues of the Bengali literary magazine Desh and the complete works of the inescapable, ubiquitous Tagore. The mansions of the boxwallahs, and judges and lawyers’ homes, and the Anglicized Brahmos added bound copies of Time, National Geographic and Nobel Prize winners to their collection. Years later, I would wince in mortified but inescapable recognition at an essay by Amitav Ghosh where he explored (and deflated) the Bengali obsession with the Nobel Prize for literature.

  Didima’s house betrayed the same obsession; but then the interests of each of the ancestors asserted itself, taking the collection in the verandah beyond the Tagore–Nobel canon. The high shelves with a special black iron grappling hook-and-slider arrangement contained her husband’s law books and the leather-bound volumes prized by a succession of ancestors: the predictable old issues of Punch and the collected works of Rabindranath Tagore found themselves alongside military histories, Urdu classics, medical encyclopaedias and always, an eclectic range of biographies, in English and Bengali.

  The house was capacious enough to accommodate mild murmurs of protest against the burden of canons and Books of Knowledge. Didima, who had studied Sanskrit and occasionally put me in my place with a judicious quote from the Upanishads when I pushed at her boundaries as a balky adolescent, dedicated herself to amassing a stupendously varied collection of Mills & Boons.

  You could trace the historical development of women’s romances by studying the gradual shift from outback love and doctor-and-nurse romances through the Greek millionaire and Italian count phase up to the modern phenomenon of softcore erotica and doctor–doctor romances. Didima disapproved of the erotica on the Umberto Eco principle that porn got in the way of a good story, but she liked the egalitarianism of doctors dating, rather than doctors hitting on nurses. In his office and his bedroom, my uncle maintained an eclectic collection of paperbacks on subjects as varied as Tibetan Buddhism, physics via The Dancing Wu Li Masters, classical music and jazz, and his passion, architecture.

  These paperbacks formed a thin line of defence against the previous generation’s insistence on hoarding all those How The World Works books, those confident encyclopaedias of everything. In retrospect, the almanacs, dictionaries and encyclopaedias so common in homes of that era were telling in their belief (most clearly expressed in English libraries, but mirrored in their Bengali counterparts) that the world could be contained and explained, and was amenable to cross-examination.

  In the Rowland Road house, the books for children were placed judiciously around every room, in the low window alcoves, in the cupboards under the stairs. It was typical of my grandmother’s intuitive understanding of children and her deep-rooted belief that their needs were just as important as those of adults. She scattered the books that children would like around the house in the same accidental fashion as she left large blue plastic bowls filled with sandesh or jam tarts from Kolkata Club and chicken patties from Nahoum’s or plain puffed rice or grapefruit from the tree near her window, out on the massive dining table. We were supposed to help ourselves to either kind of nourishment, as and when hunger pangs struck us.

  This was the city a
nd this was the house where I ate my first book.

  *

  At the age of three, I was already a pest. This was mostly my mother’s fault, though it is possible that I was born believing that the purpose of everyone who showed up in my life—the multitudes of beloved and loving uncles and aunts in particular—was to entertain me. In our equally rambunctious home in Delhi, another place that overflowed with books and assorted guests, my sister and I were only persuaded to go to bed—rather than interrupt the adult revels—because my mother bribed us with bedtime stories.

  Everyone’s mothers and grandmothers tell the best bedtime stories; this is an article of faith. They didn’t have my mother, though.

  ‘Once upon a time, between the mooli patch and the sugarcane fields that you see in the back garden, there lived a . . .’

  My mother plucked stories off the cartoon figures on the cheap but colourful bedroom curtains, and made the tiny rows of sheep or the stars on our night suits come alive as she wove them into her tales. She had the canon at her fingertips, and each night, she brought them all out, the wolves from the old dark German fairy tales, the bunyips and the goryos from around the world, the home-grown rakshasas and wizened crones who populated Bengali folk tales.

  Red Riding Hood tiptoed down the corridor on her way out to the forest. The Baba Yaga sat at the foot of my bed, and Pooh Bear dangled his paws over the headboard, leaving a jar of honey behind to provide me sustenance through my dreams. Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, who would both be politically incorrect today, visited at bedtime just as Tuntuni, the gossipy little bird from Bengal, hopped out of the window. But the best stories were the ones that my mother made up using just her imagination, where the lights would go off and we would be left with only her voice, transforming the prints on the curtains, the bedsheets and our everyday nightclothes into the stuff of magic.

  Her storytelling created a small, determined and persistent monster. I was notorious for toddling up to my father’s seniors—stodgy ministers, ultra-respectable bureaucrats from an age before scams rotted the name of government servants—and waylaying them with demands if my parents were unwary enough to let me into the room: ‘Tell me a story.’ If they didn’t have a story, I would tell them my long-playing, revisionist version of Cinderella.

  If this sounds cute, it was not meant to. I was the kind of child who made people think that perhaps Herod was justified in his massacre of the innocents—they must have asked him for a story.

  By the age of three, my relatives had learned to either flee or set me to errands in a vain attempt to ward off demands for more stories. One was never enough, and it was many years later, reading about Vijaydan Detha’s insatiable appetite for stories, and the tale-collecting instincts of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Italo Calvino, that I felt a belated prickle of validation. The gods of storytelling did it; I was just following in their footsteps.

  I do not think that Eco, Detha and Marquez hounded their victims in quite the same way, though. The old stories had to be told just right, with the appropriate embellishments. It wasn’t enough to hear about Arjuna stringing the bow at the swayamvar.

  What did you make bowstrings out of, and did they have to be waxed?

  How loudly did the bowstring twang?

  If he broke the bowstring accidentally, did he have another at hand?

  Did quivers have a separate space for bowstrings?

  Why did the prince in Cinderella have to measure her feet, hadn’t he been looking at her face?

  Why was the coach that took Cinderella to the ball a pumpkin (such an unromantic vegetable)?

  Why couldn’t it have been a strawberry, to which I was partial, or a grapefruit?

  The person at the receiving end of all of this was the kindest and gentlest soul in the house, the only uncle tolerant enough and patient enough to spend most of his waking hours being shadowed by a creature who came up to his knees and wanted story after story after story. (Even my grandmother had a three-story limit, after which she would retire to play Patience or to get some work done for the Women’s Voluntary Service and the Time and Talents Club.)

  The family version of the small pestering person in their midst is a funny story; my memories of the age of illiteracy are surprisingly dark. I must have been three when I realized that books contained stories, the way tins (if you were lucky) contained biscuits, and from the time that I made that connection, my mind was not at peace.

  So much of childhood is a balancing act between the first, indelible rush of astonishment and discovery—and the inevitable grappling with frustration. When he was three, my young nephew named the shiny thing in the sky a ‘star’, using the word importantly, and I could see the satisfaction in his eyes, the glory of naming everything in the world for the very first time, ever, as though no human being had done this before him and no one would do this again.

  Those first thrills of discovery are fierce and unforgettable. So are the first discoveries of frustration, being denied something that you want so very badly—and that is readily available to everyone who towers over you and belongs to the remote world of adulthood.

  I would stare at the ranks of leather-bound and cloth-bound books with a hunger so intense that the memory of it is as palpable as the memory of cold, or thirst, or grave injury. Here were books, within reach, many of them. They contained the stories I wanted so badly. And when I opened the books and the magazines, one after another, black ants crawled across the page, silently, saying nothing to me, indifferent to my presence and my need.

  My uncle took pity on me and decided to teach me how to read. It is possible that he wanted to be able to retreat and draw plans of buildings without his niece attached to his leg, bawling because the story he was telling had ended and there would be no more stories, ever, but it was kind of him all the same.

  I have no recollection at three of tracing the alphabets or learning the English letters, though from another time and place, I do remember learning both the Bengali and the Hindi alphabets. There must have been a stage when I went through the ABCs the same way as the kaws and khaws, but it has slipped the net of memory. By the time I turned four, my uncle’s lessons must have taken hold somewhere in that hungry-for-stories mind of mine.

  I remember the first words I read the way I remember nearly drowning in the sea off Goa once, the shock of the water rushing into my nostrils; or the way I remember reaching the top of a hill in Bhutan and stumbling breathless into the high monastery only to come face-to-face with a statue of the Buddha among the clouds and the jagged peaks. It is that sharp, and that electric.

  The book was in hardboard, handsomely covered, a miscellany of poems and stories by writers so out of date that even their names are dusty today. The landscape on the front cover was uncompromisingly English, the meadows and polite rows of sheep and the cottage in the background with a stream running by it all completely unrelated to the cities I lived in and knew, Delhi and Kolkata. The pages were thick and creamy, the illustrations embossed in ink that did not smear across the opposite page even in the full heat of summer. And as I turned first one page and then the other, the black ants marched up and down, up and down, waving their antennae mockingly at me.

  Then they slowed.

  Then the words swam into focus and I could see them, and hear them as clearly as though someone had said the words in my mind.

  Slowly, silently, now the moon

  Walks the night in her tender shoon.

  I said the line over and over to myself, some part of me knowing even then that Walter de la Mare’s ‘Silver’ was terrible poetry, but what I was revelling in was not the words, or even the images behind them—the moon, peering out through a fringe of trees, in a dark night sky. It was the sense of power, of owning some words at last after having to beg them from adults for so long.

  I turned the page and there were no ants. Only more words, and each word marched alongside another until I had read a complete sentence, and the sentence pulled me into the books a
nd stories I had coveted and desired for so long. ‘Shoon,’ I said to myself, not knowing that it was merely the word for shoes, and a pretentious one at that. ‘Shoon shoon shoon.’ It was magic, being in that house filled with books, wondering how long it would take for me to read all the stories that all of them contained.

  The celebrations in my family when they realized I was reading were heartfelt, most of all from my uncle. Part of it was the altruistic welcome that seasoned readers offer to a new initiate; most of it was relief.

  When I was alone in the room, I said ‘Shoon’ again to myself, wanting to celebrate. Then I checked to see that no adults were watching, and hefted the book off the divan. I took it under the dining table, sat on the cool pink mosaic tiles, and hugged the book closer. If the words sounded that good, I thought, how would they taste?

  Tentatively, I licked the page. I would discover later, through a process of trial and error, that Bengali books seldom tasted good, that paperbacks were dry and crumbly, and that exercise books were watery and disappointing. But the words ‘shoon’ and ‘silver’ and ‘moon’ had a tiny acrid bite to them. Like a practiced thief, I turned to another page in the book and tasted the text there, just to see. Close up, the paper smelled a little like cookies, or like the waxed paper frill around loaves of plain cake. I let my teeth slide over the edges, stopping when Romen, the chef, came in and rummaged through the cutlery in the sideboard.

  When he left, I bent my head to the book and with my teeth, tore off a corner of the page. It went down well, though it didn’t taste of much except unsweetened porridge. Boldly, I tried a little more, pleased at the thought of eating what I had just read. Then I looked at the page more closely and panicked: instead of the tiny corner I thought I had torn off, there was a gap, a large tear, a perceptibly ragged edge. Silverfish darted through the older books like illegal sub-tenants, but even at that age, I knew I couldn’t pass this off as a silverfish hole. The page was palpably gnawed.