There was a time when I would head for the club library every fortnight, to pick a selection of four titles from its shelves of gruesomely messy murder mysteries, bleeding bodies famously strewn around as detectives attempted to find the culprit while patching their own acrimonious personal and professional lives. Usually, I’d have read them all within the week, and would be wondering when next I could lope across to the club for the next intravenous bloodfest, but it’s been three months now that I’ve been renewing my loan of the same books, not one of which I’ve been as much as able to flip the jacket of.
If the library’s where I get my vampire fix, I save the bookshops at Khan Market, or at the airport, for the bestsellers that need to be snapped up for quick reads — where Presidents go AWOL, heads of multi-billion dollar corporations conspire to bring ruination to Botswana or Zaire or perhaps Taipei, or steal nuclear secrets that will make them masters of the universe. But the stories of lawyers and doctors and scientists who find secrets thrust at them, race against planetary or personal annihilation, chance upon love, and in the nail-biting but completely impossible manner of Bollywood blockbusters, are able to exact revenge yet save the world/ country/ metro/ village from untold horrors, are piling up on the bedside table, as unloved and untouched as last week’s stale pizza.
Increasingly I’m finding that the more we as a family read, the less people around us do. Certainly they’re fewer book-buyers around, so it’s difficult to lay your hands on your friends’ collection of humour. Chick-lit, yes; rom-coms, again, yes; feel-good writing, perhaps; but no, no one’s got good Wodehousian humour on their shelves any more, or none from where you can borrow it with every intention of returning it, but even so there’s a row of them in the bathroom that’s still to feel the steam on their pages.
Fortunately, the publishing houses send out huge packets of books, arriving in the office as large parcels, with every known, lesser-known and completely unknown Indian writer packaged in hardbound or paperback, in the largely vain hope of a review. That takes care of Indian writing in English, popular Indian fiction, literature, and that bogey of non-fiction writing with a purpose. It’s free, it’s accessible, and it’s mostly putrid, making one wonder why it was published at all.
But it’s getting increasingly difficult to read as one spends more free time away from home — so it’s entirely possible to go from Bill Bryson in the loo to Tarun Tejpal over breakfast and coffee, to Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi in the car (where, surprisingly, given the length of red light stops and crawling traffic, one gets to read the most — though sometimes irate drivers will blast their horns as you remain absorbed in fiction while the cars ahead of you have raced on) to perhaps Nandan Nilekani in the office, to P D James at the bedside for a night’s read — the best place for a chilling murder, I find, is one’s own bed!
Which would be very well if it wasn’t also irksome: Surely one can’t have forgotten that Shiva and Marion are twins, not just brothers, in Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone? Weren’t there three dead people in Ruth Rendell’s crime story — where did the fourth corpse come from? When love stories and ruthless takeovers, medical mysteries and legal wranglings begin to coalesce, when the hunted from one memoir begins to resemble the hunter in another, when you haven’t finished books — or even a book — in months but are still reading as much as before, then it’s time to take a break. I’m returning the thrillers to the library this weekend. Yes, unread.