Hangovers of the Bibliotherapic Kind

Authors can be the best and the worst. They can make you feel. Sometimes, you find a book that refuses to get out of your head and you know that your life has just changed and will never be the same ever again. I love and hate it when a book does that to me. I love the hangover that a brilliant book leaves in my mind and I hate the fact that I can never read the book for the first time ever again, that it will never surprise me at the end of paragraph 67, when the murder case is about to get really heated or the French chef whose cooking is paramount to the well being of your newspaper is about to give notice for the umpteenth time

But what about the books you come back to? The books whose spines are worn out and whose paperback jackets have been stained with fingerprints so many times that you can quite literally read them with your eyes closed? 

Picture a cafe in Paris. Hemingway sitting and drinking beer and writing a story that was until a moment ago writing itself and now is being written. Now think of that English paper you couldn't finish which asked you about Hemingway. Suddenly you are an undergraduate again and the working world is far away and you wish to fly into a book and get lost in it, while the outside world can go jump off a cliff for all you care

I have recently become a reader again and the part of my day that I look forward to the most is when I sit with a good book and read one chapter and then another and then another. The world (as stated above) jumps off a cliff and for those stolen moments I make memories or I read someone else's memories or walk around in someone else's imagination. A book is my portal into the mind of someone else. What will I find there? 

Will Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence teach me about genius? Will Isabelle Allende's My Invented Country show me a picture of Chile which will remind me how much I love Kolkata? Or will it fall to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast which will remind me that it's very important to visit Paris once before I die? 

I look back at all the times books have given me hangovers and taken me by the hand and transported me to cities and locations in time or kingdoms with dragons and knights in them and I shed tears of joy, and anger and frustration and melancholy. From a rickety bed in India, my imagination enters a cafe in Paris or a restaurant in London or a bar on the highway in America which smells of smoke and stale whiskey drunk straight from the bottle...and I'm safe again. No matter how my day has been, I have a book

That's a good thing to come home to. You see, in all my years on this Earth, books have been there by my side while humans have come and gone. I guess that's why a book is dear to me and most of my friends are fictional or in love with people who don't exist

So the next time the world gets too much for me, I'll pick up a book...and I'll lose myself

Again and again and again

The Bilge Master

My Journey to Completing My Middle Earth Collection

 

J.R.R. Tolkien came into my world on a windy February evening when my father walked into my room, freshly returned from a tour to Chandigarh trying to sell multicoolers. I had a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring in my library. 

As I dived in, having never heard of JRRT before, I loved the name Bilbo Baggins and I just could not stop reading. I read about Gandalf’s fireworks, about how the journey to Rivendell was thought of and executed and of course I marvelled at the burden Frodo was made to carry. I think it took me about a week to finish the book, because of schoolwork, but luckily, my parents always encouraged reading in me and let me stay up late finishing books. “Lights out!” was an exclamation I never heard.

A year later, for my tenth birthday, I got the complete one volume edition of The Lord of the Rings and I was off. My birthday was in October and I spent winter of that year lost in the realm of Middle-Earth. To this day, I get chills when I read of Gandalf’s encounter with the Balrog and how it allowed him to ascend to his true form, I want to be there when the Entmoot happens and I wish I could stop feeling scared when Aragorn (AKA Strider) walks the Paths of the Dead with Legolas and Gimli. Having secured the trilogy and devoured it more than seven times in the course of the next five years, I must now take you with me to a bookstore in Salt Lake where I found Unfinished Tales and The Silmarillion. It was Tolkien time again!

But here, my search hit an obstacle and many moons passed and while I watched all the movies when they came out, humming and hawing about if the Witch King of Angmar was scary enough or if Treebeard was endearing enough, my collection of JRRT’s works seemed to have hit a wall.

And then…my father went to America and came back with The Hobbit…and the fever hit me another time, for one does not simply read The Hobbit without once revisiting the trilogy does one?

However, my quest was not yet over because one book remained- The Children of Hurin.

For what seemed like an eternity, I searched for that book. I went to College Street- they said it was out of print. I had not discovered Bookline (a quaint bookstore in the myriad bylanes of Kolkata) back then, and I thought my collection would be doomed to remain incomplete.

So, imagine my joy when my father took me to Golpark to see someone last year and because I was bored, I wandered into a small footpath bookstore and there it was!

The Children of Hurin, second-hand, 155 rupees. Hardcover.

A journey that begun as a seed in the mind of a 9-year-old boy, saw its end almost sixteen years later. I now have all the books. Sometimes I look at them and I feel gratitude to them, because without JRRT, there would be no room in my brain for Christopher Paolini, Anne McCaffrey, Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett.

I feel like I myself have gone through the length and breadth of Middle-Earth to find them all, and in the darkness bind them.

 

The Bilge Master