Guest post
by Ashoak Upadhyay
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About
three years ago, my wife and I moved to Pune from Mumbai, a shift that involved
throwing out a lot of knick-knacks collected over the years and for me bringing
home the collection of books that we had kept stored in cartons in a small flat
in the northern most suburb of the city.
I
decided to set up my library in the Pune apartment and so had the sealed cartons
sent over by a bronchial tempo on that may well have been its last journey
spewing smoke all along the expressway till it sputtered to a halt below our
house.
Many boxes hadn’t been opened in all these years;
their contents hadn’t seen the light of day for more than a decade. I had
forgotten their existence, the bland, marker-pen inscription scrawled across a
side, “AU-Books” offering few clues about their individual identities.
To
the assonant sounds of my new neighborhood’s frenetic modernization--vehicular
horns blasting, bleating mindlessly, drills screeching through iron rebars at
construction sites that spring up like warts overnight on a green landscape and
the fetid stink from open garbage dumps overtopped like ice-cream cones that lingers
like bad memories, I began wrenching open those boxes. Huffing and puffing.
I
tore apart the top-end folds, lifted the files sheltering the piles below from
God knows what, began excavating. My breathing slowed, a tinnitus hiss drove
off all sounds as I gazed down upon the pile I had pulled out, setting aside
one book at a time onto the floor beside my stool. I felt like Alice falling
into Wonderland Titles and cover illustrations flitted before my eyes like
ethereal images from a forgotten life.
To
say that these images awakened an elegiac mood of an age when I had read so
many of these works of great literature would be half the story. They altered
time from a chronological sequencing, day to night, minutes to hours into time
moving elliptically, from one temporal plane to another, fusing, separating but
always vivid.
They
seemed to have a smell of their own too. A handful of paperbacks, Penguins, let
off a musty smell of mothballs and newsprint, pages crinkling as I flipped
them. Miss Havisham and her wedding cake! I was young Pip! Then Joseph Conrad
floated before my eyes. Conrad! I hadn’t read him in a decade! I pulled one
novel out after another: The Secret Agent,
Lord Jim, his magisterial Nostromo, paperbacks. And then, as if
holding them all up, An Outcast of the
Islands---a tattered hardback 1929 edition, his scrawl on the last page, “…Cordially
Yours…”
All
senses, sight, smell tactile immured me into this elliptical time zone. I shut
my eyes and saw this callow young man, a promiscuous reader scouring the pavement
stalls near Cross Maidan for bargain paperbacks to help him define his place in
this world.
Why
did he buy Antonio Lobo Antunes’ South of
Nowhere? I flipped through it amidst the gathering pile around me. Was it
the blurb that described it as a first person narrative of Portuguese
colonialism in Angola, its depravity?
I
picked up Under Western Eyes,
paperback. The bronze horseman on the cover, his forelegs reared up as if to
crush a puny figure fleeing before that terrifying prospect took me to
pre-revolution Russia just as The Secret
Agent brought me to an England that Conrad savaged in that great work.
Continued in the post below:
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