I had always been a reader. Not a book nerd, but someone who read a lot. As a child, I would read under the blanket, with a torch, late into the night. My parents got me a library membership. I borrowed books and returned them so quickly that every time I went in, the strict-looking librarian would look up and sigh. The way she’d look at me was to say, I don’t think you really read all these books. I didn’t care anyway.
At university, I read English literature. Classics, tragedies, comedies, contemporary Indian fiction, I read it all. My world opened up and expanded. 800-odd pages of the classic Gone with the Wind were nothing. I devoured it in three days. Scarlett O’ Hara was my heroine. The last line of the book, when the dashing Rhett Butler walks out on her, and instead of crying her eyes out, she bravely says, tomorrow is another day, became my motto (it still is!).
I finished my degree. Then, I stopped reading. It happened slowly, gradually. I didn’t even realise it. I would join book clubs, but never turn up. I got myself library memberships, but never borrowed a single book. Whenever I saw a bookstore, I went in and spent hours pulling the books out of the shelves, reading the back covers. I spent more time with the books I had already read and were my favourites: Wuthering Heights, Midnight’s Children, Persuasion, We need to talk about Kevin, Sophie’s Choice. I ordered Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never let me go just because he won the Nobel Prize in Literature and everybody else was reading him. I never opened a page. I bought lots of books and my bookshelves continued to bulge.
My phone lit up one evening. It was Bernard. He was a friend from university. I hadn’t heard from him in ages. I answered. He opened with: what are you reading these days? I deflected his question. I started to ask him question after question, just to avoid answering his one question. He persisted. I confided in him: I had only read one book that year.
I did start many others but given up after three pages, or less.
Silence. Then he said, but you love reading. Yes, I do, I said. Just keep reading, he said.
It’s not that I didn’t see the hypocrisy in my behaviour. I did. I bought books because I supported the independent bookstores. I wanted them to have my money, rather than the big online booksellers. Yet, I never read them. There’s a Japanese word for it: tsundoku — acquiring books but never reading them.
I talked about books; I recommended books, I felt like a fraud.
A parcel landed on my door. It was Anita Brookner’s Strangers. Along with it, a note from Bernard: let’s see how quickly you read this one.
I opened the first page. Then the next, and the next. Over the next few days, even when I felt like giving up, I read. I looked at most people looking down at their phones as they walked by and then put my head down to read the book. Two weeks later, I finished it.
I picked up another book a month later from my unread collection. It was The Poison of Love, the English translation of KR Meera’s Malayalam novel Meerasadhu. I read slowly, savouring the narrative.
Two months on, it was UR Ananthamurthy’s Kannada novella Bara.
I read. Not as much as I used to, but not one book a year, either. The greatest gift, after all, is to be surrounded by stories, isn’t it?