Where the books go when you’re not reading them

I don’t enjoy shifting cities. Setting up a new place can be very stressful. Perhaps the only thing about it that I enjoy is the opportunity it gives you to arrange all your books. In the process you end up spending many pleasant hours with some old, long-forgotten friends.

You open the carton and pick one up. As you wonder which shelf it should go to, you flip through the pages, and start reading at random, something like “To Helen, a gift was not something you gave to person number one, but something you didn’t give to person number two. This was how we wound up with a Singer sewing machine, the kind built into a table.” You want to read on, but you have a task to complete — emptying all the book cartons (there are eight of them) and transferring their contents either to the book shelves or to the loft.

You sigh, put off the decision of where it should go, and pick up another book. You again open a page at random. “An erection is a thought and the orgasm an act of imagination. The male has to will his sexual authority before the woman who is a shadow of his mother and of all women.” WTF, you say to yourself, and continue to read. Before you know it, three hours have passed, it is lunch time, and the wife peeps in to check, gives you that look, and says, “WTF, you haven’t emptied even one carton yet!”

It was to avoid this scenario that in Mumbai the wife had taken over arranging the books, with the result that I could never locate a book when I wanted it. How is that possible, you ask. All I need to do was look carefully, no? No. As it happens, the ease of locating a book depends a lot on the logic of their arrangement. If the logic of the arranger is not the same as the logic of the searcher, then the searcher and the searched may never meet. At least not until the searcher and arranger move cities and the books have to be arranged again.

In our Mumbai place, the wife had taken a ruthlessly pragmatic approach. Initially, I had trouble figuring out her logic. How could you mix poetry with sociology? And Foucault sitting next to Stephenie Meyer? One day she told me: she had arranged the books according to height - yes, height! Like how kids are made to line up in school for the morning assembly. The shortest on the extreme left, the tallest on the extreme right. So if you ran your finger across the spines, you could begin with Billy Budd and end at Guide to Effective Marketing Communications or some such tract I wouldn’t dream of admitting to owning.

And it wasn’t only height. The wife’s selection criteria, not unlike that of a college girl appraising potential boyfriends, was a complex matrix of age, height, good looks, and hygiene. So the physical attractiveness of the covers, the newness of the title, and whether it was a 1948 edition stolen from a hotel in Goa or purchased last week on Flipkart, decided whether the book went to the Gulag or the top row of the new bookcase the carpenter will make. That’s how Padma Lakshmi ended up in our living room while Rushdie went into the loft to co-exist with lizards and spiders.

Granted, in a situation where there are more books than there is shelf space (which is always the case, isn’t it) you have to choose, much like Sophie did, between your beloved children. But put yourself in the book’s shoes for a moment (I know books don’t wear shoes, but still try). If I was a book, I’d do anything to be out there on a shelf in the living room, I can tell you that. It doesn’t matter if I am Chetan Bhagat, I want to be sitting up there with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Kenzaburo Oe. So the point is, as a book arranger, you need to be fair, and follow a logic that books can live with - and that doesn’t include height or good looks. Not in my book.

So, that’s what I’ve been doing the past two weeks — curating my bookshelves. Arranging and rearranging, casting Delillo into the dungeons, retrieving Agassi from oblivion, moving Follett to the middle row, commanding Llosa to take Follett’s place.

I feel like the warden of a huge, cosmic hostel for living and dead writers. And I get to decide who shared a room with whom. Should I put Theroux alongside Naipaul? Or have the arch-MCP Henry Miller trapped between Greer on one side and Steinem on the other? Would Sylvia Plath be uncomfortable with Russell Brand, or would she be happier in the company of Emily Dickinson?

I shuffled them around, trying out different rationales — nationality, genre, author, subject, century of publication. Should I put all the French authors together? But how can Flaubert be on the same shelf as Catherine Millet?

Do I put the books I love the most closest to my desk? Or should that honour be on rotation basis — with the books on my current reading list sitting within arm’s reach?

I banish literary giants from my presence, on a whim, and summon them back when I wish. Come to think of it, even the world’s most powerful literary critic (who’s that, by the way?) can never wield such power - except in her study.