Some Books

Some Books 

Some books have you email or talk with friends - as you read them or for days after you have read them. This possibly is as you have fallen in love with the world they have brought into your lives. And love brings with it – sharing.

Some books come to you at just the correct time – the phase of life you are in, what you love doing at the time, what all you want to me amidst and more. It is as if the entire world conspires to bring you and the book together then (with due respects to Paulo Coelho)!

Some books make it clear, in black and white, that being busy is all about priorities. Minutes turn into hours as you move from one page to another, from one chapter to another. Like the coffee and chocolate, you love and are ever eager to have more! And, when you see the end approaching you have that unique feeling of being content yet empty – an emotion which perhaps only books bring out.

These are books you do not want to give away after reading. And if you end up lending these you are at ease only after the books have been returned. Books you want to revisit. Books you feel good about – when they are around. Books, you are glad, like you are about some people, that they came into your lives.

If I go back in time I had a similar experience with A House for Mr Biswas. It has been years that I read the book and even now I recall the wall Mr. Biswas would see as he walked or how even when he was a baby he was always referred to as Mr Biswas and more. For days (and weeks) I was left wondering about the place and the characters.

It was as if a relation was established with the book. One that I would revisit each time I would also read about the book. And I read about A House for Mr Biswas each time I came across it. I was amazed to learn that Naipaul was not even 30 years of age when he finished this book. How the book is looked upon at by the people today is intriguing – including by those who have it as a part of the curriculum in the part of world it is located in. 

James Wood a couple of years ago, on the book, writes in the NewYorker: . . . This book, so full of comedy and pathos, uncanny wisdom and painful compassion, containing a comprehension both of human motive and of a society’s dynamic that might take most writers a lifetime to achieve, was written by a man in his mid- to late twenties . . . This double vision, moving between colonial rim and colonial center, between empathy and shame, pride and humiliation, brings extraordinary ironic power to Naipaul’s portrait of Mohun Biswas . . . Now he is gone, but his book continues to give back the past to us, again and again . . .

I got his Bend in the River for me and (the Hindi version) of A India: A Million Mutinies Now for mumi. I recall one day a senior friend had mentioned him being awful writer. And I had not felt like continuing the conversation!

During the recent years it has been Shamsur Rahman Farooqui’s A Mirror of Beauty. I got to know more about the period the book talks of than I was previously familiar with. How the Dilli of recent past (read about 200 years ago) which he brought out with all the delicious detailing was so very different from the Dilli of the Westerners (or our school text-book writers); sensibilities worlds apart.

What must a person have it in him to have not only written this book but also translate it? I got another book of his – The Sun That Rose from The Earth and also looked him up on youtube. Urdu, he mentions in one of the conversations I came across, meant Dilli. During these conversations glides from one language to another. I wonder why as a student one never heard of him?

Muhammad Umar Memon in his review in Mint writes: . . . His substantial knowledge of world literature in easily half-a-dozen languages, compounded by his uncannily intuitive sense of all the nuances and intricacies of the poetics of good fiction, enables him to bring the culture and the character so deftly together that neither can survive without the other . . . Something of an epic in its expansiveness, The Mirror of Beauty defies any attempt even to enumerate its tantalizing wealth, much less to adequately discuss it in a few hundred words . . . The whole way of life of 18th and 19th century India is gathered in the novel’s encyclopaedic sweep . . .  

I recall how Anjum Hasan’s review of the book in Caravan Magazine had got me intrigued and how I had been left bewildered on a friend’s asking if this book was available in PDF.

Getting more than expected is ever a happy experience – all the more with books. This has been a case with both these books.

Time is ripe for another such book and me to find each other!