I have been reading a lot of picture books lately for the course I am doing on children's libraries. Some of them are absolutely stunning in terms of artwork, innovative fonts, thought-provoking layout, economy of text and multilayered narratives. And yes, I will blog about them soon.
In the meantime, here is a piece I wrote inspired by a picture book titled A Child of Books by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. Enjoy!
I am a child of books.
I sail across a sea
of words, as I read myself into books and read myself through books. Leaning
back against the sturdy branches of the bimbli
tree in my childhood home, or the warm sunkissed tiled roof of the house where
I spent my teenage years, I spend hours making friends with people who live in
the pages of books, and come to life in the squiggles that work like magic
spells.
I read books to get through school and college. I read books
at parties, too shy and awkward to converse and make friends. When my father
books tickets for long bus journeys to visit relatives during the school
holidays, I pack my bag with a tome or two and prepare to journey through forests of fairytales.
I come from a world
of stories, a place where giraffes browse in my backyard, Goethe’s Faust
sinks into despair, and Irving Stone’s Van Gogh paints his madness onto canvas.
“Thigele gandi peshi kadetha”, my
grandmother laments worrying that my absorption with the book in my hands will
prevent me from noticing my surroundings (read housework that I will be
expected to do). My mother smiles as she places a third and then a fourth dosa on my plate and, finicky eater that
I am, I eat them without noticing, for I am busy savouring Hemingway’s tale of
the old man and his battle with the fish rather than the coconut chutney on my
plate.
In college, I discover Kafka and the Russian writers and am
drawn to the abyss of despair that their writings open up. “Come away with me” they seem to call
out, and I shake my head, knowing that like Theseus, I will find my way through
the maze.
I get married and move to Bangalore and my books travel
along with me. (“No, ma, I don’t have space for my trousseau saris, I have to
pack my Jane Austen collection”) When returning from our honeymoon, we stop
over at Calcutta and rush to College Street, where I buy Johanna Spyri’s Heidi for three rupees, and Rabindranath
Tagore’s Chitrangada for two rupees
fifty paisa! My husband and I set up
house, linger over our book collections, and hurriedly arrange the other stuff
in some semblance of order. Dusting takes a backseat, as I pick up a copy of
Melville’s Moby Dick and upon my imagination, I float.
When my son turns one, a circulating library in my neighbourhood
shuts shop, and vulture-like, I swoop on them to buy up their stock at
throw-away prices. Dog-eared copies of
Enid Blyton, Bertrand Russel, Robin Cook and A.J. Cronin form a contiguous
chain of book joy as they perch spine-to-spine, next to each other in the rough-hewn
shelves we have fixed to the walls in place of the floor to ceiling,
wall-to-wall mahogany book cabinets of my dreams. I plonk my son into his pram
and walk through the Jayanagar fourth block complex, travelling over mountains of make-believe. I notice with a start
that the only people I can recognize and who know me back are the people at
Nagasri Book House.
In the school and college classrooms where I pretend to teach,
I share my love of books with the students. We discuss Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief and Amitava Kumar’s Bombay London New York, and talk about
how books have shaped us. I write plays for the children to perform on Annual
Day, and the stories are drawn from Greek myths, Indian folk tales, science
fiction and other tales of yore. My reading shapes me and the ways in which I
shape the world around me. When I visit Germany, I spend some quiet moments at
Bebelplatz, beside Micha Ullman’s installation of an underground library with
empty shelves, to remember the horrific night when the Nazis burnt twenty
thousand books. I think back on Bertolt
Brecht’s poem "A Worker Reads History" and understand there are treasures
to discover, even in the darkness.
I dream of opening a library, a bookstore, a publishing
house. I dream of crafting stories that speak, of writing books that will call
out to readers, of creating narratives that will resonate with others’ lives, of
spinning yarns that will help them escape the banality of reality. I dream. Ah
well, imagination is free.
With apologies to
Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston - the phrases in bold are taken from their picture book, A Child of Books.
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