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

"Hello Lamp Post, What'cha Knowing?"

 I turned 28 two days ago and there's so many things that made my birthday special. The party, the wishes and the camaraderie. I still cannot spell that word, so thank you Dictionary feature on Google Chrome. 

It's been a strange life for me so far. I've loved. I've lost. I've become a rage filled monster and I've changed to become a mellow person but someone who has massive panic attacks sometimes and needs to do something with their hands to calm down. I've had a lot of struggles and I've been so messed up that I've not even acknowledged my achievements. 

Anger is all I've known for so long, so very long. And yet, here I sit, hands flying over a keyboard, phone humming as someone in London wishes me on Instagram, as an email arrives for me from Dubai, as the person whom my mother considered a friend drops her number in my WhatsApp and as my book club repeatedly, repeatedly laughs at me, with me, sings for me, dances for me and shows me, I don't need to be angry anymore.

It was my birthday two days ago. Two days have passed and yet people still wish me. They say they feel bad they couldn't on the day itself. Another message arrives from someone who is a first year sociology student and says he has ordered a book for me and wants to hand deliver it to me with a birthday message. I finally found the confidence to tell someone in my life that I value them as much as The Little Prince valued his rose. 

I do not know how it came to be that someone who saw only red and nothing but red, someone who was bullied in school because of his prowess in English and his skills, by those people who would just take advantage of him and blackmail him and take advantage of his loneliness to pass their exams...someone who lived his entire formative years in survival mode, is today sitting at this computer writing about how he turned 28, weaving a story about it in real time.

When I was about 20, I wrote a poem where I said that for a long time I've been staring into a face in a mirror and I do not recognize the face staring back. I repeated that experiment on my birthday, just before I walked into the kitchen and cooked a chicken dish. I came face to face with someone else. He was taller. He was fat, but he was not as fat as back then. He felt fitter and he felt he was breathing better. The child who stared at his 28 year old self could only wonder..."Is this who I've become?" 

What has this birthday taught me, you ask? I have learnt that I deserve love. I have learnt that I am good enough. It's easy to say haters gonna hate now. It's easy to say, I matter now. I may not matter to those related to me by blood, but I matter to someone in Romania. I may not matter to the racist Hindi teacher who made me fail ten times in Hindi and was instrumental in me feeling like shit throughout class nine and ten but I matter to the English teacher whom I've found again after more than 17 years, who called me twice on my birthday and who waits for my visits with a cup of coffee at the ready as I curse her laptop for making her life hard and ask it to grow up. I matter to the computer teacher I have not spoken to for over ten years, who I reconnected with and who remembers my birthday and wished me. I matter to the girl I met and who yelled at me on the phone because I had removed my birthday from Facebook and who couldn't wish me on the day.

I matter to the people who don't want me to look back anymore. I matter to the people I am going to grow old with, to the people who will share their milestones with me. I matter to the Instagram stories I'm gonna see, the ones from the accounts I follow, where there's a potpourri of artists and humans who make amazing content and need to be seen.

I matter to the Spotify playlist I'm making. I matter to the book I've finished writing that someone very close to me is editing now and that needs to see the light of day. I say I am not good enough and yet I am good enough to find three jobs in a pandemic situation and decide to leave two of them because I realised that they were not good for me, that they were affecting my mental health and not letting me be me.

How can I still be an angry person in survival mode anymore? It is time I realized that life is something to be loved and lived, to be spent with the people I've found along the way who love me and want me to live my life and share my life with them.

The friend who told me I gave him the confidence to write a blog of his own

The bookstore owner who calls me "babu" and has always told me I can come and have tea with him

The oldest friends in my life, friendships lasting 17 years now 

The stories I have to tell

The journeys I have to go on

The artist who sends me presents because I hugged him

The January baby who has her own scars and yet is always smiling, always growing, always full of ideas and always creating 

The bespectacled, long haired, little goofball, with the Honda limited at 140kmph who calls me a brother and says I'm an amazing DJ (and makes fantastic gin and tonics)

The two people in a far away land whose kids aren't here yet but who want me to be around when they come by and I can share books with them

The elder sister whose father has the same name as my father and therefore has opened her heart to me 

The younger sister just discovering Prufrock, with a rapier sense of humor who said I don't look as old as I am and nicknamed me

The person who helped me over one of the hardest losses in my life and set me back on my feet and wants to be at my wedding 

The doctor who fought by my side and brought me back my sanity

The other people, in the shadows, waltzing with me, smiling at me, blessing me, sharing my life with me

And lastly, the life I have not lived yet.

Time to live, time to love.

Hello! Let's live a little! 

Vamos!

The Bilge Master

An Apology

 For a moment my mind goes totally blank and then my hands find a few keys to strike. I strike them and suddenly this, whatever this is, starts to write itself.

I once had a nightmare when I was little. I feared I would be forgotten. I wanted to remain in the minds of some people. I wanted to not be forgotten. But then, I read The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and I realised that Joker was on point when he said that memory is treacherous. We remember a lot of things without wanting to and we forget a lot of things without meaning to. I wished for a powerful dagger like the one Prince Dastan had in Prince of Persia, but that would have been me giving vent to my hubris and even in Prince of Persia if you run out of sand for the dagger, you die. 

I grew older and people whose corporeal forms I had interacted with became ectoplasm in pockets of my mind and I stayed a dreamer. I dream of them and of their stories and I tell others of their stories. 

I am not a good writer, but if you take away stories from me, my mind will revolt and trash and struggle like a cornered animal, a deer that freezes in the headlights of a speeding car driven by a man who has had one too many beers and is driving home in the cold sleet of an oncoming European winter.

I think I've realised what this is. This is an apology to the nightmare I had when I was little. I think that somewhere is a house and in that house resides all the ideas that I have forgotten about. They are cripples. Some do not have legs or hands. Some do not know how to talk. Drunk on the ambrosia of creative adrenaline, I went too far with some of them, danced with only Diz and Dante and left Lucy somewhere in the sky without any diamonds. I think those ideas hate me. They feel they were not good enough for me. But then again, they forgave me and did not make me forget that I could learn to be a good writer. Those abandoned ideas sent more ideas to me and some of those ideas turned into non treacherous memories. 

More importantly, the graveyard where the ideas that didn't even see the part of the world I had created for them and died in birth lies to the north east of the house, in permanent repose. Those corpses haunt me in a different way. They make me run to books, and through books to stories. They fuel the ever consuming fire in me to make love to the written word, to disappear into a mythical world when the real one is too unkind. My love for stories lives on, as my attempt at winding up this apology slips away from me. My tired mind sips lukewarm tea and my phone reminds me that I need sleep. 

But I can't sleep. I have promises to keep.

I wonder if the ideas will accept this apology. 

The Bilge Master