When books find their reader

For one reason or the other, often out of a need to break the depressing spells of silence that bully drunk conversations, I have found myself talking about books and life. I love books. Most come wrapped in a story which is why sometimes recounting how a book came into my life is often accompanied by the same shock of pleasure that one experiences upon reading it. Over the years I have begun to think that sometimes instead of me finding a book, a book finds me and adds value to my life. How does the book know where to find me, I do not know.

Two books found me a little over a year ago. This is how it happened. One evening, a little over a year ago, a friend of mine came over for a round of drinks. We sat around talking mostly about life. In our own ways both of us were going through a serious patch of craziness. When life began to dull us we began to talk about books. We drank and spoke with passion. Halfway through the bottle of whiskey, one of us began talking about memoirs. I do not know how it began but I am pretty sure it began soon after my friend started complaining about the lack of honesty in anything he read those days. Why do Indian writers find it so tough to be truthful when they talk about themselves? The problem puzzled us.

Around that time I had been re-working on some pieces I had written a while ago to explore certain themes in detail that I had to skim through in the pieces  due to the space constraints in newspapers. To me the exercise was both exciting and painful. The day my friend came over, I had spent the morning writing about an incident that happened when I was in studying in a school in Delhi.

I showed one of my longish reworked pieces to him and asked for his opinion. He read the piece with great reluctance and did not like it. My friend thought I was confusing honesty with self-consciousness; he suggested I rewrite the entire episode. I was too drunk to take his opinion seriously. I spoke at length about not having read one honest memoir by an Indian writer and why I felt I wanted to write one. As the evening wore on and the alcohol depleted we became bitter; by the time we wrapped up we were almost having a fight. I went to bed thinking of memoirs.

When I woke up the next morning, I found two memoirs on my bookshelf. The books, My Story, and A Childhood in Malabar, were brand new, written by the poet Kamala Das who at that point in time seemed as strange to me as the unannounced appearance of her two books on my bookshelf.

For a few minutes after I woke up, I tried to act like everything was normal and called up a few people asking them if they forgot two books at my place. No one recalled anything. It so happened that barring my friend from the previous evening, I had had no visitors for over a month. Naturally I assumed my friend left the two books for me. The idea was appealing. When I called up my friend he got angry with me and thought I was pulling a fast one.

I was shocked for days. No one seemed to share my sense of wonder. This depressed me further. Slowly I got over the fact that the books appeared mysteriously. The ‘how’ out of the way, I decided to dwell on the why. One day I opened the two books and read them cover-to-cover in three days flat. I was blown. The books were the finest piece of personal history I had read in a long, long time. Once I read the books, their appearance no longer bothered me. Books come to people to be read and as long as they are read who cares where they came from.

The author is a writer.