Caught Somewhere in Time: Of Battered Paperbacks

 I've always been one of those people who stay up late reading and I'm currently reading Shibumi. The copy I have is a secondhand one, possibly stolen by my father from a library. And earlier today, as I was  heating up dinner, I happened to encounter a spirit in my house, a harmless one that stopped by to say hello and is now nestling in the bookshelves, possibly reading Isabel Allende.

I have been seeing ghosts and reading paperbacks since I was a child. I have scribbled stories about them on paper, on napkins and now on digital canvases like this blog. There are plenty of paperbacks in this house and plenty of memories about the people to whom those books belonged to as well. 

There is a certain charm to opening a volume and seeing my grandmother's scrawled dedication in it to me. Off the cuff, I remember my copy of Asterix the Legionnaire has a dedication scrawled on it. The pages have turned yellow now though.

It makes me think sometimes, like an itch in the back of my head that I can't seem to scratch: Is a book I found in a shelf in my house there for a reason or by accident? Is it a book my father liked but my grandmother adored? Is it a book my mother hated and I worship?

This house is full of memories in the form of books. It is caught somewhere in time, smelling of vanilla essence and freshly made coffee and in it lives a reader and his father, silently reading. 

There is something curiously intimate about this house and it has a library that records the people that came to stay in it, the people whose memories and whose future can be found in the books it has in it.

The Bilge Master

A Conversation With the Child in Me

 I’ve heard it said often that children can’t wait to be adults and that adults wish for their childhood back. It’s a strange conundrum indeed. So, I thought about asking the child inside the adult that I am if he wanted to be a child again. Allow me to walk you through the answer he gave me. 

He said he remembered quite a few things about his childhood. He remembered his soft toys Khepi and Halum Sheikh, a stuffed doll, and a stuffed lion respectively. He said he remembered his mother cooking lemon chicken and he remembered reading Uncle Fred in the Springtime on the school bus and in between classes.

The adult me however has a different series of memories about these incidents. Uncle Fred in the Springtime becomes Thank You, Jeeves in my narrative, the pressure cooker cooks not lemon chicken but traditional Bengali kosha maangsho (meat curry) and my mother, well she’s dead now.

The child in me is confused. Dead? But ma had promised she would be around to see me married! She would be there to welcome her first grandchild. How can this be? This can’t be true! Tell me how I can stop it, future me! Please! 

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his father changed too. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that the Maruti 800 became a Maruti 1000 and then a Ford Fusion or that he would change schools and he would see the city change and that his beloved grandmothers would also die. Just then, he interrupted my soliloquy and burst in

Hey. You! What about our father? What happened to him? Is he okay? What happened to our car? 

Well kid, we got a dog! The Ford was the car he rode around in and his name was Chuni and we called him Chuns, you and me. He was the light of our lives until one day he was called back to where he came from. I should also mention that we learned how to drive that Ford and a very attractive woman in an Audi raced us down NH2. 

So, you see kid, we don’t have it all bad. There is a lot of good! We meet with artists; we take photos. We go on a solo trip to Delhi and we finally get to read about Bruce Springsteen. Remember that guy? Dancing in the Dark? Yeah, him! We find his book in the future! 

I don’t know how to tell the child in me that as I grew older, my mother grew old with me and changed, that I changed. I don’t know how to tell him that Khepi is no longer a toy I like to play with, that Neil Gaiman has taken the place of Aesop’s Fables and that I’ve broken a girl’s heart and had my heart broken as well. As for the chicken, I cook it now.

But come on! yells the child in me. Now he wants a fight with me. How could you become like this? What changed? Is this what I become? Motherless, lost, confused?

No, I whisper, holding him close and rocking him gently. You become the writer of a blog that has tens of thousands of views. You meet people who want to be in your life, who love you. You grow up into the sort of man who shops for his father, just as his father shopped for him. You possess the confidence to leave jobs and get new ones. You have to understand just one thing, you’re still you. Inside me is you. And I love you, I  have always loved you.

Yes, you feel scared and lonely and the women you fall in love with seldom are the right ones for you. But on the other hand, women tell you that they feel safe around you. You’ve started to explore more with your writing, you know what you want to read now and guess what? It isn’t the classics! So, come on kid. You’ve got this journey to go on. Start travelling to meet me. 

I am you and you are me. Together, we can take the world. Maybe one day, you’ll look back on this exchange of thoughts and wonder why you were worried about becoming an adult to begin with! And maybe one day, when I’m old and gray, I’ll dig out this exchange of thoughts and tell my younger selves that growing old isn’t that bad a thing to do.

The Bilge Master