Subir Roy: Encounter in book world

OFF BEAT

A moment on the other side of the footlights

I really loved the advice that my English teacher Ivan Sassoon gave me as I became a senior and entered the last lap of my schooldays. If you pursue your textbooks faithfully, you will get a rank; if you read widely and discriminatingly, you will get somewhere in life.

I was least interested in getting somewhere; all I wanted was to be able to escape the drudgery of textbooks with a clear conscience. That advice set me off on a long and endless journey into the world of books.

Actually, reading a book from cover to cover was by no means the primary aim. At that stage what books represented, rather than what they actually held between covers, was more important. The idea was to first get an entry into the world of books.

To be able to talk knowledgeably about the authors in vogue and allowed to sit at the periphery of groups where solemn, scholastic people discussed books and authors was a huge achievement.

And if you had just taken the first step in the journey to become a journalist by publishing your maiden "letter to the editor" in the Statesman, then among friends you were a minor celebrity, whose right to hold forth on books was readily conceded.

The engagement with books got stronger once I managed to cross the portals of Presidency College, despite the lousy school results. My teacher was proved right. I was travelling hopefully, never mind the marks. At the college the book talk was taken for granted and excursions into pseudo-intellectualism easily accepted.

Being unconventional was de rigueur and our hero was Debu who got caught stealing a couple of books from the British Council library. Anybody could steal, the capitalists did it all the time, but to dare to steal books, risking getting caught, needed class.

Making books one of the worlds you lived in was all right, but there was this nagging feeling that you were not doing the full act. You were ending up talking a lot about books and buying a good number of them while not reading many of them.

But any doubts one had about posturing more than actually doing the thing was set at rest when early in my journalistic life I interviewed R K Dasgupta, then director of the National Library. Rationalising the love of books, he uttered a sentence which has ever since been etched in my memory. "Books are to a scholar, the way ornaments are to a woman."

Collecting books was an end in itself. This was fantastic. Every time you saw a book that you liked in a bookshop, resources permitting, you bought it. There need be no pangs about how may of them that you had bought lately you had actually read.

There was this minor problem "" Dasgupta had referred to scholars, which we were not. But my friend Amit was unfazed. We would become scholars one day and read up most of what we had bought, at least after retirement, he declared and went on spending a fortune collecting books. If Debu was our hero in early college life, Amit became our role model through working life.

This bit about actually reading the stuff finally caught up with me the other day when a friend presented me with a copy of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez title. My daughter read it through breathlessly and loved it.

If you like him so much then read One Hundred Years of Solitude laying right there, I said, pointing to one corner of a dusty shelf. She read through that also at the speed of a Bangalore youngster riding a motorbike and sat down to discuss the book with me.

Sorry, I haven't read it yet, I confessed. She was amazed and asked, you have had a book like this for 20 years and not read it yet? I said lamely, I will read all of them once I have a little time, certainly after I retire. When I saw from her expression that retirement was a concept which was too far away for her to comprehend, I corrected myself and said, I will get down to some serious reading once my book is over.

That day has come and I have crossed another milestone in the journey into the world of books. If you love theatre you sit on the lesser side of the footlights and dream that at least once you will be on the other side, even if it be for a two-bit walk on part.

This is because unless you have seen the world from both sides, no matter how fleetingly, you have not really lived. Buying books, stealing or failing to return them to friends if you care for that sort of thing, and occasionally reading some of them is great fun. But most book people nurture a secret desire, to be an author just once, no matter for how fleeting a moment in the public's attention span.

The new Crossword bookshop in Bangalore is a great place to lost your sense of time and a good part of what's in your wallet. But that is best done on the ground floor. The first floor, which has mostly toys and CDs, is patronised by sensible youngsters.

But on the odd day you will find a few rows of chairs, a handful of people facing them from the other side of a long table and talking away as if they had nothing better to do. And at the end of what looks like a rite of passage comes a funny ritual.

The attractive wrapping of a book is torn and it is held up to the lights, a few camera flashes go off and people turn and nod at one guy more funny than the rest who does not know what to do with himself.

The ritual was thankfully over soon. For a brief moment I had been on the other side of the footlights, a group that I had always dreamed of joining, those who write books instead of simply collecting them.

The absurdity of it all came through when a youngster addressed me as Dr Roy and asked me to inscribe his copy. It took all my self control not to burst out laughing and reveal that not to speak of acquiring a doctorate, I almost never became a graduate, having failed in maths pass the first time round. That would have been unfair to him and taken out all the joy that he had got out of spending Rs 350.

sub@business-standard.com