The girl who ate books : adventures in reading

368 Pages·2016·1.53 MB·English

by  Roy

THE GIRL WHO
ATE BOOKS
ADVENTURES IN READING
NILANJANA ROY
For those ace storytellers, Ma and Baba,
who never once said, ‘You’re too young to read this.’
Contents
Prologue
ONE: EARLY DAYS
1. The Girl Who Ate Books
2. Finding Dean
3. How to Read in Indian
4. 1857 and All That
5. Pioneers: A Line of Unbroken Trust
6. Goodbye, Britannica
7. English, Vinglish
TWO: POETS AT WORK
1. Dom Moraes
2. Arun Kolatkar
3. Jeet Thayil
4. Agha Shahid Ali
5. Kamala Das
THREE: WRITERS AT WORK
1. Allan Sealy, in Dehradun
2. Kiran Nagarkar
3. Manjula Padmanabhan
4. Khushwant Singh
5. Arundhati Roy
6. Vikram Seth
7. Ruchir Joshi
8. Kiran Desai
9. Vikram Chandra
10. V.S. Naipaul
11. Ved Mehta
12. Nayantara Sahgal
13. Pico Iyer
14. Rohinton Mistry
FOUR: BOOKLOVE
1. Physical
2. Booklove: The Pavement Booksellers
3. The Baba Yaga in the Back Garden
FIVE: BOOKLOVERS – FIVE OF THE BEST
1. Ravi Dayal
2. Prof. Meenakshi Mukherjee
3. Sham Lal
4. P. Lal
5. K.D. Singh
SIX: PLAGIARISM – THREE UNORIGINAL STORIES
1. V.N. Narayanan
2. Kaavya Viswanathan
3. Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen
SEVEN: EXPRESSION
1. Hold Your Tongue
2. Empty Chairs
3. Crossing Over
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Book
About the Author
Copyright
Prologue
‘We’re done,’ I said.
It had taken almost two weeks of sweat—all too literal, in Delhi’s humidity—
to clean up our bookshelves, and I was staring at the end result. The Holy Grail
of bookshelves, the ultimate shrine, the sanctum sanctorum, the point where
every booklover and hoarder’s pilgrimage ends: an empty shelf. Two of them. A
gift from the gods, a sign, allowing us to continue on the manic, ruinous path of
collecting books that marks a reader forever, setting him or her apart from the rest
of the community as surely as you wearing a silver bell that rings: ‘Hoarder!
Hoarder!’
Booklove is a dangerous thing. Those of us who have it do not joke about it
or take it lightly, because booklove is all-consuming. You move houses with an
eye to wall space, and you covet other people’s bookshelves, especially if they had
more skilful carpenters than you.
My partner and I both inherited moderately large libraries, and perhaps we had
fallen into the trap of thinking of these only as ‘family books’. The inheritance
had come in a mass, as one solid bookshelf worth of things to be read and dusted
and looked after. But as I sorted these books, I suddenly found myself back in
touch with people whom I could never have known, because they had died
before I was born.
As we pulled them out from the bookshelves, looking at the names inscribed
in faded fountain-pen ink on the fly-leaf, I began to see more clearly the
individual readers behind the ‘collection’.
Here was the doctor from two generations ago who loved history, here was
the boy straight out of his village who built a broader world by reading in three
languages, here were the reformers whose hopes for a better world were encased
in their lectures, and the essays they collected.
My grandmother on one side brought in cookbooks, women’s magazines,
Mills & Boons, and sometimes, the anguished memoirs of pioneering Bengali
women. Her handwritten ledgers reminded me that none of my other
grandmother’s books had survived—her collections of almanacs, volumes of
Bengali literature and even her own short stories had disappeared after her death.
I could almost see the gap in the bookshelves, remember the way her presence in
our house had allowed us to float comfortably from English to Bengali,
demanding and receiving stories in both languages.
Over the years of our marriage, these books had been buried underneath the
inevitable layers of more and more books, the objects that haunt professional
readers and reviewers. Discovering them made me wonder how we had sorted
our shelves in the first place. The present had dislodged much of what was really
important and meaningful, and there was a special pleasure in rescuing and re-
reading what had been allowed to slip to the back.
The slow accumulation of books in any reader’s life testifies to many things,
but chiefly, to hope. There is nothing more optimistic than a shelf-ful of books
you have not yet read, but that you mean to get down to someday. And yet, too
much booklove, and what you have is a disease; the books you do not love and
would not normally read or keep or treasure, or tell friends about, accumulate
thickly, like fungus, like mold, around the books that you truly love and will
come back to, again and again.
As we assessed the books, perhaps we seemed ruthless, in the way that we
discarded perfectly good writers and anthologies. But as I placed each book on
the donations pile, I also sent up a silent prayer for it, hoping that it would find its
readers.
Books, like people, like children, should always be certain of a warm
welcome, wherever they go next. Few books survive in their physical form
beyond 150–200 years; in that time, perhaps they should exchange readers a lot,
perhaps they should be shared until their beautiful bound leaves start to drop and
shed. They deserve to be loved, especially the old ones, that were hand-sewn,
hand-bound, made with care.
As we cleaned each of those shelves, I inhaled dust for three weeks, and
became sick from the past. We sniffed the pages of encyclopaedias and
dictionaries so far beyond the restorer’s art that they fragmented at the lightest
touch, exploding into the air like enchanted objects. But whenever I looked
upon the books, mine and my partner’s, I felt a sense of kinship that went beyond
the blood ties of family. The people who had bought and collected these books,
our ancestors, were ordinary readers.
The two of us loved books and reading and authors for no good reason except
that it had been encoded in our DNA by the previous generations, because we
had lived in homes where everyone read books, as a matter of course. My father
had grown up in a small town with a tiny library; in later years, he bought books
expansively, with the same joy of the forbidden that was reserved for things like
expensive, imported chocolates.
When I look more closely at the ‘family’ books, one thing stands out. You
don’t collect books to demonstrate how much you know about the world;
instead, these small libraries represent every reader’s acknowledgement of how
little you know about the world, and how much you reach out for it anyway.
Collecting books is the same as looking up at the stars: you don’t want to own
the stars, any more than you want to own books or the knowledge in them. All
you hope to do is to brush the surface of wonder, to acknowledge that there is
still, as an adult, some part of you that is always in awe of, and in love with, the
world and the word.
*
This book is chiefly about the love of reading, and about a reading childhood in
India. It is not intended to be a history of Indian writing in English (though
you’ll find some excellent histories of Indian writing and publishing in the
Bibliography) or a history of contemporary Indian writers. Instead, these essays
track one reader’s journey—sometimes awkward, often magical—into becoming
a writer. Most of these essays were written for the general reader; my apologies in
advance to those academics and scholars who are already familiar with Dean
Mahomet and the rest of the gang of Indians who wrote in English in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and who will not find much here that is
revelatory. Because I love reading in Bengali and grew up in Delhi and Kolkata,
these essays centre on English, Bengali and those two cities; I can only hope that
readers incensed by this evidence of gross bias will redress the balance by writing
their own memoirs of reading in other parts of India.
Some pieces originally intended for this edition were omitted, on reflection:
three long essays on reading Indian writers in translation, on memoirs and
writings about caste in India, and on cookbooks and on food writing seemed
incomplete, and besides I wasn’t sure I was in any way qualified to speak on Dalit
writers. Book reviews were left out for the most part because I prefer writing
them to re-reading them. An ambitious essay on a subject close to my heart, the
libraries and reading habits of prominent Indians in the national movement, has
been set aside until I can find time to read the little magazines and journals of
those decades.
The first two essays, ‘The Girl Who Ate Books’ and ‘Finding Dean’, are about
reading, and the slow, tentative shift towards becoming a writer and finding my
‘family’: a bunch of excitable, eccentric and voluble Indians from the eighteenth
and nineteenth century. ‘How To Read In Indian’ collects assorted profiles on
the pioneers of Indian writing in English, from enterprising eighteenth-century
spa proprietors armed with pamphlets and chutzpah, to the early twentieth-
century woman who set up schools for Muslim girls and imagined a classic
feminist Utopia. From the novels written after and about 1857 to a glimpse of the
language debates over Indian English to a previous generation’s obsession with
the Encyclopaedia Britannica, this section touches very lightly on the history of
Indian writing in English across three centuries.
‘Coffee Break’ compiles short interviews with writers: from Kiran Desai and
Pico Iyer to Nayantara Sahgal and Ved Mehta, most of these conducted for
Business Standard over the last two decades, and includes two brief appraisals of
the works of Rohinton Mistry and V.S. Naipaul.
The subsequent sections, ‘Booklove’ and ‘Booklovers’, are a tribute to fellow
bibliophiles, and roams from childhood reading in the era when Soviet books
flooded Indian libraries to reminiscences of houses built of books, and short
memorial pieces to five stalwarts of the publishing and bookselling world.
‘Plagiarism’ and ‘Expression’ are explorations of faultlines of two kinds: the
trouble that greed and carelessness can get writers into and the dangers of silence
and censorship. ‘Crossing Over’, the last essay in this volume, is for everyone
who wants, in their secret hearts, to be a writer.
I have only one suggestion to add: despite the title of this book, I can
guarantee from personal experience that reading books will cause less heartburn
and acidity than eating them. If you remain undeterred, choose books with crisp