Cupboard

by admin

May 3, 2020

676

• Book lover
• Book reader

Twenty four years ago, my husband had a cupboard made for me as a gift for our first wedding anniversary. The old family carpenter made it himself instead of leaving the job to his minions. He sat cutting and scraping and fitting it together, humming a bhajan under his breath, while I hovered, discussing minutiae and watching it come to life. It was the last job our family carpenter completed in our home. Manilal considered himself very much a part of the family. He lectured, counselled and comforted me, the young daughter-in-law of the house, when he felt the need to do so. He delighted in my Gujarati speaking skills, used as he was to Parsi households that massacred the language. If anyone cast a shadow of a doubt on the strength and durability of his workmanship, he would promptly clamber on whichever piece he was crafting at the time and jump up and down with his considerable weight. Most sceptics retreated hurriedly in the face of such supreme confidence. He retired soon after completing this last job and disappeared. I miss him and his gruff exterior, his inquisitiveness and his masterclass in carpentry.

Six feet tall, polished in a medium teak finish, the front and side panels mostly glass, wooden shelves, cut glass handles, my cupboard is a solidly handsome piece. It houses my most precious material possession – a lifelong collection of books.

I grew up in a home crammed full of books and music. Books lay everywhere, sometimes gathering dust and food stains, but more kept coming. Library books, books bought at fairs, birthday presents of books…each of the readers in the family had a book in each room. A living room book might be a fast paced thriller (Robert Ludlum and Alistair McLean were heroes in our house), while the one waiting in the bedroom could be a romance or a travel book. Reading at the dining table wasn’t frowned on much. Mom was too busy reading her own Sidney Sheldon or Wodehouse to do any frowning. She’d thrown open her book shelves to me by the time I was twelve, encouraging me to read everything from lurid Harold Robbins to old medical text books (those two helped with sex education in vastly different ways), Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen, the classics, potboilers and biographies…

I was fascinated by coffee table books and encyclopaedias as a child. The beautiful binding, the hard cover, the uxoriously thick paper, the enormous price tag, all these features set this genre of books apart from my every day reading. From the ages of five to fifteen or so, I added so many to my collection. Each time my birthday came around or I did well in examinations, my father and I would make a ceremonial trip to the bookshop. PaiCo in Cochin and Higginbothams in Madras. There, I would spend an hour or so debating the choices solemnly with Dad. Here I must say that my Dad doesn’t care for reading much. His true love has always been music. But he had a wife and daughter whose noses were forever buried in books. He was a little bit in awe of my mother’s education, I think, and very proud of her too. Having dropped out of college and sensibly taken himself off to a factory job, it was a source of great joy to him that his wife was a college professor and his daughter even seemed to enjoy studying. So while he stayed out of my academic supervision, only signing my report cards with a flourish, this outing to the book shop two or three times a year was his way of encouraging my reading habit.

Then there were the bookshop owners and staff. An old gentleman at PaiCo who delighted in conversations with six year old me about Noddy and Billy Bunter. The young and handsome Manu at Side Effects who pointed me towards Gerald Durrell and Agatha Christie. The stately staff at Higginbothams who indulgently allowed me to curl up on the floor and read, after ascertaining that I had been taught how to handle books. They presented me with a free bookmark everytime I visited. Many years later, dear Mr. Shanbag of Strand Book Stall, happy to point out his favourites and the best deals on Asterix comics. My cousins and their wives, who have introduced me to new and exciting authors,  generously adding to my collection each time they visit.

I love my books. I look after them, pay attention to them. No dog ears, or food stains. Instead, a pile of bookmarks from everywhere. My favourites? The Star Wars one that came with the boxed DVD set and the Three Butterflies beaten metal bookmark from MOMA that I lost some years ago…bookmarks are meant to be shared. I’ve noticed how often I’ve handed back library books with one of my bookmarks still stuck inside.

Years ago, a friend brought me the most beautiful bookmark from Europe, gold and shimmery, the Lovers by Gustav Klimt in close up. I loved it. The very first time I used it was in a library book. Some lucky member of my local library now treasures it…I hope. I remember it so fondly that I plan to embroider that painting as my next cross stitch project.

I love the look of my full cupboard. The smell of these old friends when I open the double glass doors. The stacking and restacking of three rows on each shelf as I search for that one book I must read right away. I try and read through my entire collection every couple of years. It’s admittedly a struggle with the heavy hitters like War and Peace and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Old friends like Shogun, To Sir with Love, LOTR and The Garden of Evening Mists show signs of my love – they get read every year or so.

My guilty pleasures are there too – the Eva Ibbotsens, the Julia Quinns and the Conn Igguldsens. Gerald Durrell, E.B. White and William share a shelf with Asterix and Tintin, Calvin and Hobbes, Dennis, Hagar and Garfield. The treasured collection of poetry in its own stack between a pair of beautiful engraved bookends my parents brought me from Georgia – creamy magnolias and green leaves. Two books of love poems lie here, with velvet covers and thick, tear- stained paper. Each given to me at the right time and in the right place by the right person.

On the top shelf are my childhood collection of coffee table books. Books on birdwatching, Tirupati temple, Porsche cars and dogs nestle alongside encyclopaedias, the collected works of Shakespeare (a handsome black and gold embossed leather cover, each page edged in gilt and the thinnest, almost transluscent paper), an Illustrated Children’s Bible and my hardbound Amar Chitra Katha collection.

Reader’s Digest is disparaged and mocked by some for dumbing down and condensing fine literature. Well, I got started on many great classics because the condensed books hooked me in. My mom had brought these back from her stay in the US and added to them over the years. It was a natural progression from our collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed books to the wonderful writing of mostly small town American writers. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, To Kill A Mockingbird, Roots, Joy in the Morning – these were books I first read here. I’m not sure I would have ever otherwise read these authors in India – we grew up reading mainly British authors in the seventies and eighties.

The book that triggered my armchair traveller bug is also a Reader’s Digest publication. The Book of Word Travel. There are short articles written by great adventurers and travellers,with beautiful full page photo spreads. The one on Tahiti has a wahine sitting facing a waterfall. Barebacked, curly hair cascading down, the reader knows she is a beauty even without her turning around. Amsterdam Cheese market – two sturdy men carry balls of edam cheese on a basket slung between their shoulders. Machu Pichu and Angkor Wat – brooding, mysterious, eternal. The Serengeti – a shadow of a hot air balloon reflected on the great plains as the giraffes and zebras are startled away from their grazing. These are the places I dreamt of travelling to one day. Some years ago, I landed in the middle of a tropical storm on a tiny airstrip in The Serengeti. It was everything that book had promised me as a young child, and more…

These books have been my friends and guides. Each time I open the cupboard, I know which book will call to me and say, each in its own way, come away with me into someone else’s imagining. Walk a few steps in someone else’s path. See the world through another pair of eyes. Increasingly, take comfort in reading of another’s pain and redemption.

The barter stall at the local literary festival is a sad place because of all the year’s bestsellers that lie there forlorn and unwanted. Read and discarded, it is a sorry fate for books. I hope that if I ever write anything worth the paper it is printed upon, it will be a book to be treasured and read again and again, as I treasure my books. While the lockdown is on, my eighteen year old has borrowed my ancient copy of LOTR. He seems a bit intimidated by the fine print and the thousand plus pages – I resist my usual tactic of bulldozing and wait for him to fall in love with the magic hidden in the pages of this book. From Middle Earth is only a few steps to where a cupboard lies waiting, for hands other than my own to turn the key, open the glass fronted doors and find many other worlds to explore.