The Roadmap to Bibliophilia

 Golpark has changed so much these days and yet you can find so many books there even now in the age of the Ebook and the piracy and the Kindle rising like a behemoth and everything going binary. In the future not so distant we will recall Orwell’s Big Brother and not Asimov’s R Daneel Olivaw.

 Since Samhain will shortly rise, I must bring to your attention these diaries about a library that has been built a long time ago and continues to evolve. This is a family story. It has suspense and ghosts in it or rather the dedications of those not with us, the post cards sent to a wife from another hamlet by her husband and the telegram a son got from his mother, away on holiday in Darjeeling. The hand written dedication in an Asterix comic which a grandmother scrawled before gifting the book to her grandson on his birthday.

 If you look at one of the three copies of To Kill a Mockingbird in this library, you will find one in which a mother now dead has remarked that the copy is for her, for “She tried to teach To Kill a Mockingbird. On his last birthday, the son of the house let his dear sister add a book to this library when he accepted the delivery of Tamas by Bhisham Saini.

 It is almost as if this library has a life of its own, a protector of its own and needs of its own. Every now and then, just as a woman craves attention and a man likes his smoke or his beer, the library likes it if someone stands in it and flits from shelf to shelf, picking out a book here, putting back a book there or jumping into the room and noticing that this shelf of books could do with some dusting.

 Where did it all start though, this haven of bibliophilia? I think it started sometime around the time a woman walked into a library and the librarian told her that her usual chair had been occupied by someone else. This disturbance in the Force must have led to a massive lightsaber duel, or did it? What if the woman was not inclined to violence and instead found that the man sitting in her usual chair was a PG Wodehouse buff and liked Bertie Wooster more than Lord Emsworth?

 Or could it have been the time that someone walking along College Street suddenly found a copy of Sons and Lovers going for about 6 paisa and grabbed it and ran home in the rain and put it up there with Emile Zola’s The Kill?

 Where is this library, you ask me? Why? Do you want to meet its custodian? Would you like to add something to it? Do you just need books like a sword needs a whetstone or are you just curious about which wand chose this wizard and if the wizard slew a Balrog or not? Or maybe the wizard in question is akin to Destiny of the Endless, always writing the Fates of Mankind in a book while his brother Dream gives William Shakespeare another idea to cure him of his block?

 You would be surprised to find both Gaiman and Shakespeare in this library, as well as Asimov, LeCarre, DH Lawrence, Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Jane Austen, Erica Jong, Irving Stone and Alistair MacLean.

 And so, one day I will take you there and you can meet the person who curates the library now, dusting it and arranging it and he will tell you more about the books his mother left behind, the books he got from Romania and the books he has had his eye on for some time now. What say you? Would you like some tea with this man?

 I warn you though, just as this library seems too good to be true and while I know it exists, there are a few things about the custodian you should know. He knows of witches who are adept at curses and hexes. He knows of a person, advanced in years who is not your average warlock and he himself keeps a record of the books in it on a certain device and makes sure those who borrow from him give back the books they’ve taken.

 A friend to those who want to read, this library’s stories have been handed around to a group of listeners and he always knows which story to tell. Just ask his friend AP, who had no idea of Gaiman before he narrated Sunbird or Jay who found a fellow Arthur C Clarke fan hiding in the ship of the Ramans.

 Yes, this man lives in the world of make believe more than the world of things to believe in but he finds a curious safety in the realms of the elves and the faeries, talking to ghosts about if they can eat food when they’re dead or trying to decipher his grandmother’s recipe for mutton.

 Come, let us go make our visit!

The Bilge Master