Read! Read! Read!

Another desultory day in Madras. Temperature soars , both weather and temperament wise. And then there’s a cable fault and everything comes to a standstill. The oven, the AC, the fans, the TV, and …and… and… how will you ever get through the day? For the computer won’t work either when there’s no power! So what is a jobless writer to do?

First things first, thaw all the chicken breasts in the freezer, quickly cook on the gas stove and cool and shred and stuff between bread slices with mustard and mayonnaise. Pour out tall glasses of orange juice that is beginning to get nicely down to a balmy room temperature since the fridge is obviously not working. Now the children and you are all set for lunch. The husband having long escaped to office where they are not experiencing power cuts and cable faults!

Maternal duties done, it’s time to indulge in some old fashioned reading by which you mean not on the computer screen but on good old fashioned paper. So the cupboards are rummaged. Most books there have been devoured, some many more times, others quickly and not very attentively, some read and then savoured for seconds. Knee deep and then elbow deep and then heart deep into the depths of book memorabilia.

Book memorabilia? Well actually you are not sure such a thing really exists. But nothing else comes up in your mind that could better describe the chunks and slices of images, words, phrases, sentences jogging your memory when you leaf through a book you had read before. Not all parts of the book are still familiar, but some sentences or phrases glitter like long lost souvenirs in the sand. You pick them up and turn them about in your mind.

They bring back more and more parts of the book you’d read long ago. So you sit on the floor, now on your haunches, now with your legs flat out, fingers greasy and gray with old dust. Stories hop about all around you like friendly birds.

Some books have made you cry in their time, some have made you laugh, one or two have made you angry, others outraged, thoughtful… You relive those experiences, those page worn experiences, those thumbed and brittle with age page worn journeys you once took with the authors…

…You have not realized when tea time came and the children made their own peanut butter sandwiches to be eaten with swigs of milk that has begun to sour; the sun has left behind his sullen rays to pick out the gold on furniture edges; dusk quietly sets about crimping  the purple contours of sky. The books are alive. The worlds they encase within their covers –  some hard, some leather bound, some inexpensively pliable paperback – pour all around you. The sudden warmth of candlelight distracts you for a minute maybe. Your daughter has lit a few, so you don’t hurt your eyes. You remember vaguely that she is still not allowed to strike matches. But the child loves books too. And you are glad. Sometimes the worlds from her books tumble into yours and the sweetness of that experience hurts in your heart.

Today however is not such a day. Today you have entered that maze world all by yourself with no one to call after you. It has been a one of a kind journey. It has been good. So you shake your head slowly and rise on creaking knees. Dinner is not on your mind. The pizza man is always faithful!

It has been a strange and magical day. The silence of the machines having been drowned out in the riotous colours and imagined sounds of a hundred lives, myths and  histories, you thought you had buried somewhere and forgotten. You have lately not believed that it was ever possible to be free…This expansively free…

Then, like two well worn coins, soft with age, two slim books, almost like pamphlets nudge your hands. You lift them up to see better and the memory of them wafts up like the smell of warm damp earth after the rain. One is a book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, not one of his famous ones, but a quiet one, the one he slipped in,  onto the unsuspecting reader – “The Story of  a Shipwrecked Sailor.”  The other is the one you’ve hugged to your bosom many times, many years ago and before - ”The Old Man and The Sea” by Earnest Hemingway.  The two books in your two hands, and in between the freshly read story from Sybil”s Garage  swims up “An Old Man Went Fishing on the Sea of Red.”  And suddenly it is there lapping at air and space all around you: The Sea! The Sea! The Sea!

Tags: Books, Earnest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Old Man and The Sea, Powercut, Reading, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor