It was a Kolkata summer evening in the third week of April, 35 years back, when I'd got caught in a blinding dust storm aided by strong gusty Norwesters, that preceded a heavy downpour. I remember everything getting flooded quickly in the low lying pocket of the South Calcutta neighbourhood I'd grown up in.
I'd taken shelter, deeply inhaling the smell of moist earth, under the portico of the grandest house in the neighbourhood, and one of the oldest too. It belonged to a family one of whose members had the word 'Lord' prefixed to his name -- something that used to puzzle me more often than not because the school version of the word didn't agree at all with what I used to observe while coming back from school 5 days a week.
Minutes later a known face peeped out from the 1st floor balcony, calling out my name. A boy of the same age as mine, Shunu (Shaunak in the school register) came from the grand family (he felt grand about it too, and visibly so). Shunu had an enviable collection of books that were kept neatly stacked in his own room, and very often he used to gift me 10-12 minutes of 'book-gazing' with royal indulgence, when I used to go to the grand house in excited anticipation, a couple of days a week, during the dusky hours.
He told me to come upstairs, and I was in his room in a flash, instantly prepared for yet another gratifying set of ten minutes that was perhaps awaiting my arrival. That day he took out a book and let me feel the cover, for the first time ever (which was incidentally the last). Almost choking on my rapid heart-beats, with goosebumps all over, I touched the hard bound cover, 'feeling' it deeply, my fingers wandering over one of the most beautiful stormy sea-scapes I'd ever seen, that adorned the cover. I knew the famous name, and was thrilled to hear that the 'Lord' had gifted it to Shunu, on his grand-nephew's birthday.
At that moment I wanted to turn over the hard cover so badly, I really really wanted to..but the indulgent prince ruled that my 'book-gazing time' was over for the day.
At the age of eight, I was pretty much one of those archetypal quiet,meek,unconvincingly gawky types, non-demandingly content with whatever gifts my parents got for me on a regularly biannual basis - birthdays and Durga Pujas). But that night I did ask my father, for the first time in my life, whether he would buy the book for me.
I wouldn't copy his answer word by word here, but he did convince me quite sternly that it wasn't a good trend at all to 'ask' for gifts, leave alone such "expensive" ones, which were not supposed to exist in rented one and a half room flats, like the one we lived in.
Somehow the entire episode around that book stuck to my memories, that rainy dusk when I'd touched it, and that quiet night that felt so still after I learnt yet another truth -- I don't know why, because the episode doesn't have too many spoken words.
I've moved on from that rainy evening, traversed quite a distance over uncertain terrains, to reach this very moment that finds me typing these insignificant pronouns and articles. And the book disappeared too from the conscious mind, being replaced by a variety of the printed lot.
Well, that was till the afternoon of the day before yesterday. I was roaming around holding the hand of my two-year-old daughter, her mother beside me in a newly opened mall not very far away from my house in Mumbai. As I passed by a bookshop, I 'eyed' its interiors as usual (an old habit that has become a reflex). And I stopped still. In one of the racks close to the entry glass-door, under a template that read "Children Fiction : Adventure", there it was.. the name in prominent print, the letters reading from up downwards, oriented horizontally with a mild slope, as the book leaned lazily on its less illustrious neighbour with an air of dismissive royalty. Or so I felt at that moment.
I let my family move on, and quietly pushed in through the glass door. You know how it feels -- memories crashing down on you like the breakers on a lonely beach -- everything else in the universe stands quiet while the sound of the sea breaking upon the shore rules your senses completely with its eternal unrest. The damp moist smell, the dusty gale, the fading lights of that stormy dusk came crashing upon me, and every single moment of that evening rushed past, in that silent night, right up to that last moment just before I had fallen asleep. As I stood before the cash counter to pay, I eyed the cover of my glorious purchase. The beautiful stormy sea-scape didn't fail to fascinate me one more time.
It happens. It happens to all of us -- Life is strange. Of course it is, and that adds to its charm big time. Yet some events, as a matter-of-factly, perfectly normal events, just happen, when you expect them the least. They churn your senses inside out, briefly before things get back to normal. But the strange tag somehow gets attached, to normal events. I find that more stranger than what intellectually gifted minds qualify life as, over vague, philosophical musings(much to my awe and empty-headed admiration).
As I said before ; It happens -- nothing remarkable about it. The night before last, as I proceeded to take the book from its row, I wanted to enjoy it, the spoils of my final conquest.
But I stopped. I felt so afraid.... What if everything turns out to be a big disappointment? Shall everything be worth it -- every memory, every emotion I soaked in? And I've been thinking since..
I am not afraid at the moment. But I won't read the book. I'm sure that the magic that lies inside it is the same, it hasn't changed one bit. It is me who isn't the same anymore. That eight year old boy that I used to be once, who deserves the magic of the book, and whom the magic of the book richly deserves is no more.
The book doesn't deserve me anymore. And I don't want to disappoint it. Surely there shall be someone who shall be the deserving one. Let its magic wait. I'm sure it would want to.
Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone ------------------------------------------------------
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, MBBS
Consultant Physician,
Mumbai, India. ------------------------------------------------------
"It is important to just listen for a while instead of speaking." -- My teacher ------------------------------------------------------
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