A Love Affair

With a beer in hand one day, my friend asked me – when/where and how did I fall in love with books? I tried to recall: I went to a Christian missionary school and in December every year we had the half-yearly exams followed by a holiday of two weeks for Christmas and New year & I happened to live in a locality where most of my friends studied in schools which declared holidays in January (for Sankranthi) instead of December. So, year after year, I was at school when my friends were playing and at home when they were in school. With none to play around I used to search for ways to fill my free time.

One such winter, I walked to my grandparents house who stayed nearby and went into my uncle’s room who had recently moved to the United States. I searched through the pile of his academic texts, and found two self-help books which I started reading. After completing them, I opened up our non-detailed english texts – always abridged novels – and finished them. I begged money from my mother and travelled across the city to attend a book exhibition, to simply look at or if I could, to buy more books. In one such festival I was introduced to Sherlock Holmes the sleuth from Baker Street and in another, to Famous Five, Oliver Twist, Huckleberry Finn. Soon, I started looking forward to my holidays to spend more time in the adventurous lands those authors created for me – I can never forget in particular, the rainy afternoon I spent engrossed reading ‘The Hound of Baskervilles’ that I fell off the couch when the door bell rang. Never being gregarious or a sports person at school, I started climbing the steps of our school library more often, where the librarian – sensing my interest – started suggesting different books, and I slowly moved from abridged versions to full texts of the classic novels. In one such visits to the library I came across Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (The book had & still has a profound impact on me) which I wanted to buy. I asked my librarian where I’d be able to purchase it when she suggested two book shops – Book point & A.A. Hussains. I didn’t have any money in my pocket that day, but went to the shops anyway to gaze around all the books on display. I felt like a kid staring at mouth-watering sweets on display, but unable to do anything. I came back and got the book copied (Xeroxed). It would be years before I would go back to those shops.

Every year my uncles or aunts or cousins would come from the US to visit us. Some noticed my interest in books and started to bring in their leftovers, and some brought in new ones. Homer, Encyclopedia Brown, Laura (from Little House on the prairie), Hardy Boys, Oliver Twist, Phileas Fogg, befriended me that summer. This way I had built a modest collection of 20–30 books and secured them in a suitcase. One day, I came back home, watched a few cartoons and wanted to read something – there were no new books, just the ones I read already, but, books seemed to convey a different meaning every time I opened them – and opened my suitcase. It was empty. I turned the house upside down searching for them, till my dad told me that he sold all of them to a street paper vendor. He said I outgrew them, and were useless anyway. I felt lonely, it was hard to hold back tears. I lost my friends, there was no place to hide anymore, no dreamland to escape to. I lost everything.

I moved to my grandparents house when I was twenty and started building my collection again – book by book. I’d take pocket-money from my grandfather and walk up to my grandmother and ask her again, and the poor lady not knowing that my grandfather had already given me, and would give me some again. I would run out of the house before either of them realized that I tricked them and land up at Book Point or A.A. Hussains. Sometimes, I used to visit the famous ‘sunday market’ in Abids looking for cheap pirated version of a costly book. Be it on the road or in a bookshop, among books I was always at home. Dickens, Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, Paulo Coelho, all became my best friends. As I grew up, new book stores sprang up across the city and I started frequenting all of them – Odyssey, Walden, Crosswords & Landmark – and my collection kept growing. With no specific inclination to any particular genre, I read/bought books on various subject & topics. If in one month I was into self-help & psychology, in the next I was into literary fiction & comics. Soon Dale Carnegie, Robin Sharma, Wayne Dyer, Scott Peck, David Allen, Dave Ulrich, Daniel Goldman, Verne, Hardy, Alcott, Ayn Rand, Khalid Hosseini, Kazuo Ishiguro, Elizabeth Kostova, Salman Rushdie, E.B. White, William Zinsser, John Steinbeck, Sidney Sheldon, Jeffrey Archer, Mario Puzo, Dan Brown, Chris Kuzneski, James Rollins, Ruskin Bond, Eckhart Tolle, Vivekananda, Adi Sankara, Neale Donald Walsch, J.K. Rowling, Laura Ingalls, Enid Blyton, Archie, Rick Riordan, Stephenie Meyer & others found way into my book shelf.

If some books altered my life in major ways, some did so very subtly. On many occasions, I found answers to some pressing problems – of my life – in books; with something in my mind, I’d open a book and some line from it would offer me a solution or an advice or simply make a smile, often helping me in handling a tough situation. Soon, whenever I needed inspiration I turned towards books, whenever I needed companionship I turned towards books, whenever I needed advice I turned towards books, whenever I needed solace I turned towards books, whenever I was sad I turned towards books, whenever I wanted to laugh I turned towards books, and unlike some relations, books never disappointed me. They became my life support. Today my collection is still growing and ’have more books to read than I can in a year or more, but still I don’t stop buying, ’cause I’ll always want something to read and ’know I’ll read all. With the beer coming to an end, I finished my story. I realized, just like any good love story, I never knew exactly when I fell in love with books.