A Bookstore Wanderer

Best place for me to hangout is a bookstore. I love the smell, the raw musty woody smell, that could very well have been an aphrodisiac if not for the shortcomings of human senses and sensibilities. Give me a book and I could eat it. Digestive system may go for a toss. Losing it out is what stops me. So I save it on my shelf. Till now the best smell has been of 100 gsm classic ivory paper, on which got printed the musings of one of the nephews of Tridib. Had it not been for my habit of smelling the book at every alternate page, I would have finished ingesting its content some 2 days earlier. But, pleasure of all senses is reading. So, why to treat only the eyes when I can hear the crisp turnings and feel the rough texture that’s smooth. Smooth is the smell which hits me hard and the hungry can lick the cover. So, I wander in the bookstores, to get away from the tiny shelf that’s a display of my slow reading habit. To a world of larger than life slots fitted with thick biscuits of paper. Perfectly cut cuboids of indulgence. To indulge in the sound of thumps that’s produced when biscuits are being thrown on the floor to be stacked again.

I remember surfing through a shop when suddenly I was asked by an elderly man where the works of Umberto Eco were. And I happily guided him to the appropriate shelf where the rose had its name written. Happily he went. ‘Sir, aap rehne do. Hum kar lenge.’ A store-guy comes sprinting towards me and that’s when I realize I am leveling the books on a particular shelf where the ignorant readers have pulled out some. I pushed to level. So that I can run my hand on the smooth curved thickness of  paper bricks with titles on them. That is the reason I was asked by a man to help him with an author. I know the layout of most of the bookstores that I visit regularly. That is the reason I was able to help the man. But why did I chose to help the man? I respect everyone who loves books, genuinely. So when my friend suggested me that Peter Barry is a great author and recommended by a Delhi University’s English Graduate friend of his, I got a copy of it as soon as a heartbeat. Well, not so soon. But yes, pretty quickly. I haven’t read it till now. Neither has the friend who suggested it. But I look at it lying on my shelf and I thank him and his friend who together in an intricate way introduced me to an altogether new area of literature. Literary Criticism. All the more when I realize that I was the one who instigated him to suggest one on the topic. So, I guided the man to Eco. I do not know if he bought it or would buy it in the future, but I know the happiness a bibliophile gets when he is introduced to a book. I wish the man was a bibliophile. And I wish I do not meet him ever again, for it is in the unknown that the thrill exists, and a hope that I contributed to someone’s incremental literary experience.

I do not make sense, often. Because when I see that I have not read much but have known about reading a lot, a deep remorse fills me up. Not for not reading much, but for diminishing the set of future explorations. How I wish to find a new book by Rushdie and feel the same thrill I felt when I discovered Haroun and The Sea of Stories or Mistry’s Family Matters. But I can’t, because for long I have been searching the latter’s Scream which released in limited numbers in Canada as a fund-raiser and is not available anymore. So, I feel disappointed and a disappointed mind does not make sense often. Only smells. Like a Dog. And reads. Like a Snail. Snails crawl leaving behind a wet trail of trials and triumphs. So do I. The trials of discoveries and the triumphs of selectively completing books. Wetness is memory. Indivisible and unreliable. Stream of consciousness galore when I am at the liminal stage of losing consciousness and getting sleep. With a hardbound on my chest. And another by my side.