I treasure memories; and one among the earliest I have is that of my father with a newspaper. He started each day with a cup of tea in one hand and a newspaper in the other, and he has kept up with this habit over the years. He worked in a bank all his life until he retired a few years ago. While in employment, he received a few perks; and one among those was an annual trip to a place of his choice within the country. The trip was made up of all the usual middle-class hullabaloo, and meant that certain daily rituals came to a halt for the duration we were gone. When the bags were packed, the home-made snacks in place, and myriad other affairs taken care of, there still remained one most important thing—instructions about the newspaper.
During the time we were gone, our house was to remain locked. The newspaper hawker, nevertheless, was delivered clear instructions that each day’s newspaper was to be thrown into the first-floor balcony. Upon our return, the soiled collection that had braved exposure to sun, rain and occasional hailstorms during our absence, was dried, dusted and then arranged in the correct order. Reading, however, was not the culmination of the exercise; archiving them was what he drew his real pleasure from. It was the more fruitful part of the entire exercise, in his opinion, albeit a bit tedious. A careful extraction of relevant and important information was crucial; and my brother and I were expected to down the contents of the cut-and-paste scrapbook he made, until our eyes gleamed with the light of pure intelligence. Unfortunately, we never took to it—our father anyway had this marvellous ability to store information, and relay when required, from the top of his head. He could talk about Manto and Mark Tully with as much elegance as he could about politics. Why would we labour through it?
***
As is customary in most middle-class families, my brother and I often received hand-me-downs from our elder cousins. We looked forward to it. The need to own things was strong but our diffidence in asking for any from our parents was stronger—an arrangement that worked very well for us.
When I was in Fourth Grade, a cousin gifted us a set of his old books. It arrived during the summer holidays and I took to them like a duck to water. The entire period is a blur. I only remember reading those books over and over, and over again. Of the lot, two books had the most bewitching effect on me—Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield and an abridged version of the Arabian Nights. Those were the first two books I ever read cover to cover. I am not sure if the significance of my discovery of reading dawned on me in full measure back then, but I was completely taken in by the new development, and everything else assumed a lesser role to play in my life.
***
As I grew up, I became increasingly obsessed with the idea of a reading gene. I thought that something, or someone, always propelled you to begin reading… or you were bestowed with a reading gene from an ancestor. Perhaps it was because I was consuming memoirs of authors in heavy doses at the time, and their lives were illustrious examples of what I was attempting to explore in my own. I was heavily influenced by their descriptions of an ancestor having left behind a library full of books, or their memories of a cold winter evening spent reading in the library. I had no such thing going on in my life though. An enquiring nature made me look for examples in my immediate surroundings, and I had enough to go on with. As a result, I broadened the methods of my enquiry. I quickly went from observation to interrogation—and believed I possessed the required skills from having read Dr Nikola, and The Thinking Machine to carry it out to measurable effect.
My father was the first person I questioned. I asked if he knew of anybody in our family who read, or reads; and he told me that most of his sisters did and that he read the newspaper. I told him that I wasn’t talking about that kind of reading. What kind of reading was I talking about? He mused. I asked him if anybody read stories. He said that he may have heard stories from someone as a child, and sometimes on the radio as an adult. Did that count? To my eleven year-old mind, it didn’t. Reading meant stories.
I went to my mother next. She was subjected to the same line of enquiry. Did she know anybody in the family who reads or read? Somebody, anybody! She said she wasn’t sure, but had fond memories of her father telling her stories. In fact, he had a trunk full of books that he loved, she revealed. The fog finally began to thin. Really? Where is it now? I had to know. She didn’t, though. It must be in the attic somewhere and if not, it must have been thrown away. The careless disposition with which this critical information was relayed was appalling . My disappointment was so grave that the only thing I could do was to let go of my enquiry. The trunk, however, didn’t leave my thoughts. It reappeared in elaborate fantasies—about discovering it, and revelling in the pride and familiarity of another soul having shared my appetite for books.
***
My love for books and reading eventually made a publisher out of me, and as if on cue, the quest for the trunk was renewed. While talking about a story to my mother, I asked her if she remembered any of the stories that Granddad had told her. She said that she didn’t remember any of them specifically, but began to describe an unusually fat book in his collection, written in Farsi. Granddad had taken great pains to get hold of a copy. It had a thousand stories in it, something to do with a prince killing his wives. I sat bolt upright. Arabian Nights? She didn’t remember. Was the wife’s name Scheherazade? I persisted. And indeed, that was the very name.
Granddad read you Arabian Nights, Mom!
We decided to look for the trunk again. She called a few relatives, but nobody knew what had become of it. Too much time had passed; too many years. Somewhere in my mind, I saw the stories disappear with the trunk…
To this day, the loss of the trunk—that I never saw—fills me with sadness. I am certain that Arabian Nights was part of it… but would never know the rest of its treasures. My grandfather and I never met, but I feel a certain kinship with him that I didn’t feel with any of my relatives. He was a reader and I am a reader.