In case of disaster, if we can save only some of the books we own, how we prioritise our collection and decide which books we must save and which we can risk losing reveal much about who we are… Annie Zaidi shares some insights on the different kinds of needs and emotions that bind us to different books.
The monsoon is a fraught experience for those who live middle-class lives, particularly on the ground floor. In cities like Mumbai, it means four months of squelchy feet, wading through gutter water and praying that if one must die a premature death, dear god, let it not be of something as unsexy as leptospirosis.
For people who own a lot of books the monsoon is particularly nerve-wracking. Leaky walls and ceilings mean ruined books. And if, like me, you’re on the ground floor, you will never be at rest during the rains. The house can get flooded at high tide. If the water rises four inches, books on our bottom shelves could be destroyed. If it rises two feet, we stand to lose upto three hundred books.
We lost a lot during the 2005 flood in Mumbai – furniture, clothes, books. Children’s books were on the last shelves since we didn’t read them any longer. Lots of Agatha Christie detective novels, Enid Blyton’s work, ranging from Noddy (the first series I could read on my own) to Secret Seven and Malory Towers. Amar Chitra Katha comics, which were responsible for introducing me to a lot of history and mythology. But the ones I miss most are a few Russian books bought in the 1980s. The Indian market was not yet flooded with American literature; pop culture was not totally dominated by the USA. With the Russian books gone, a slice of my cultural history was lost.
Our book collection is not extensive but it has taken a lifetime to acquire. It bears witness to the reading habits of two generations. It includes my mother’s university books, my brother’s literature text-books, and mine. Books from all genres that shaped my politics, taught me to look at gender as a continuum and not a binary, taught me about love and faith. Books in English and Hindi; some of my grandfather’s books in Urdu; even a couple of Punjabi ones although I cannot read the scripts.
I stack books in double rows on each shelf so that an invisible row sits behind the visible row. Some shelves are three thick. I’ve also begun to stack books in horizontal piles on top of a row. Last year, I donated a boxful to a children’s library. But a donation cull is one thing; sentencing a book to death by drowning is another thing. To leave a book vulnerable is to say that the ideas it holds are insignificant. Which leads to a difficult question: what books are more significant than others?
There is no better time to evaluate a book than a physical crisis. A couple of years ago, the house was flooded again. As the water rose around my ankles, I decided to put on a pair of gum boots and get down to the dirty work of classifying books in descending order of ‘significance’. On the lowest shelf went the most ‘dispensable’ ones. I’m not naming names but most of the new popular fiction from India went south. That decision was easy .
On the topmost shelf were religious texts including the Bible, Gita, Quran, Jataka Iales. There was Nehru’s ‘Discovery of India‘ and MK Gandhi’s ‘My Experiments with Truth‘, three types of dictionaries, titles as diverse as gardening, psychology and health. I can’t dispute the significance of these books (although nobody in our family has referred much to the book on party wear for kids).
About twenty books were brand new, waiting to be read. I wrapped them in plastic and placed them on the highest shelf in the second cupboard. They were important because they were potentially brilliant. They were un-dismissible because I didn’t yet know them.
Poetry came next – significant without a shadow of doubt. The shelf included selections of Paash, Kedarnath Singh, Kunwar Narain, Dom Moraes, xeroxes of Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri poems, a few anthologies. Parallel to this shelf, I arranged Indian prose writers whose work I admire. This was a surprise move because I feel no reverence or distress viz ‘Indian’ literature. I have always thought of Shakespeare and Shaw as writers without borders, as much ‘mine’ as Mirza Ghalib and Kabir.
In fact, I had recently gotten into a bitter argument with another writer. We were talking about what’s more important to Indians who read and write mainly in English. My friend argued that we undervalue contemporary fiction and overvalue the ‘classics’, particularly British and American writing. I argued that the ‘classics’ have survived the test of time and therefore deserve to be read with greater seriousness than a book that brings little more than the promise of novelty (a promise that often fails to materialize).
Yet, faced with an emergency, I found myself moving good books from the Indian subcontinent to higher ground. And my decisions were not based purely on literary merit. For example, Siddharth Chowdhury is not necessarily a better storyteller than Jane Austen. Yet, it felt more important to save a copy of Chowdhury’s ‘Patna Roughcut‘ than ‘Pride and Prejudice’. Perhaps, without being conscious of it, I do harbour a vague sense of responsibility towards Indian literature. I buy more of it. I respond fiercely to it. My memory holds the stories in sharper relief. There is a stronger need to ‘save’ books rooted in my own soil. Books that tell me who I am, what brought me to this point in history, what fantasies were wrought along the way. So, it felt imperative to hold onto a copy of Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s translation of ‘Tilism-e-Hoshruba’, Krishna Sobti’s ‘Dil-o-Danish‘ and Khushwant Singh’s ‘Train to Pakistan’.
This led to yet another hard decision: should Hindi, Urdu and English writers from the subcontinent sit on the same shelf? Do translations belong on the ‘IWE’ (Indian Writing in English) shelf? Does Jeet Thayil belong with Amrita Pritam? Does Manto belong with Vikram Seth?
I think a lot about organizing literature. Most bookstores split fiction along the lines of ‘literary’ and ‘bestseller’; ‘Indian’ and everyone else. But the divide is an artificial one as evidenced by writers like Amitav Ghosh, who simultaneously occupy three different cupboards – literary and Indian and bestseller. Besides, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Nepali and Sri Lankan writers are routinely placed on ‘Indian’ shelves (I must confess this is a sweet, secret source of joy – watching literary neighbours sitting peacefully side by side makes me feel warm and hopeful). Indian writers’ tone and social context makes them a fit natural with Pakistani or Nepali writers. Farooqi’s translation of Syed Muhammad Ashraf ‘The Beast‘ sits beautifully with Shrilal Shukla ‘Raag Darbari‘. Mohammed Hanif’s ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes‘ and ‘Our Lady of Alice Bhatti‘ is part of the same conversation initiated inside my head by ‘Train to Pakistan‘ and leading, most recently, to Zahida Hina’s ‘All Passion Spent‘.
At the same time, I decided against clubbing together all books by the same author. I decided to split Rushdie first. ‘Midnight’s Children‘ belonged with the must-preserves. ‘Shalimar the Clown‘ (which I still haven’t been able to finish) went lower. Similarly, Kiran Nagarkar’s ‘Ravan and Eddie‘ and ‘Cuckold‘ sat higher than ‘God’s Little Soldier‘.
On the third shelf, I placed “Foreign English” writers I love. Margaret Atwood and Dostoevsky and Shakespeare. Jane Austen sat with the Bronte Sisters and Hilary Mantel. On the second-last shelf, their position was a little precarious but I was not worried since I could buy these books again. Then, there were books which had seemed important when I first read them but I found I had little trouble letting them go. For instance, I had been blown away by Paul Aster’s ‘New York’; it broke up genre and form in remarkable ways. Yet, I placed it lower during the reshuffle. The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, which caused such excitement when I bought it, also went south.
In fact, I surprised myself by moving my beloved Agatha Christies to the last shelf, along with Dick Francis and John Grisham. I always say that I love detective novels and courtroom dramas. But among other things, a flood brings emotional clarity. I don’t ‘love’ as much as enjoy the lawyer-detective-crime genre. I don’t need Grisham the way I need Camus.
Another difficult decision was Indian non-fiction. It needed to move up from the bottom shelf but I had run out of space. I stood there, debating whether non-fiction was more or less significant than fiction, wondering which among them was most likely to go out of print. There are books critical to my understanding of Indian culture and politics, like DN Jha’s ‘The Myth of The Holy Cow‘, ‘The Shaping of Modern Gujarat‘ by Achyut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth, and Radha Kumar’s ‘History of Doing‘. These may well disappear from market shelves. I definitely needed to prioritize them over others. But are P Sainath, Pinki Virani and William Dalrymple not as important as Nagarkar and Rushdie? Of course they are! How was I to make room for all?
Besides, there were books written by friends and contemporaries. Literary considerations aside, most were signed at debut book launches. By what yardstick does one judge the worth of friends’ work? In a small, fractured way, their work will always be tied to mine. Being in a writer’s personal space, being part of the human climate in which the book is set, witnessing the intellectual struggle and ambition along the way – in losing such a book, how much would I lose?
Even the books I was ‘saving’, for what was I saving them? I only have a vague sense of a future for which I wanted these books to survive. Perhaps the world will change so much that the hopes and betrayals described on their pages will seem outlandish – a sort of science fiction/fantasy/horror narrative we can no longer believe. Even so, the books will remain relevant. Lest we bury our past too deep, lest we start to believe the lies of a new power elite.
That rainy day, I was about to pack a bag and leave the house when I stopped to take a final look at my handiwork. At the back of the bottom shelf, there was a pile of Readers’ Digests from the 1980s, and some copies of Parade magazine. I picked up a copy. On the back cover, there was a picture of Vinod Khanna claiming that he bathes with Cinthol soap. I wondered why I had never thought him handsome before. Clearly I, and my tastes, had changed.
Suddenly, a new fear took hold of me. My tastes may change again. In ten or twenty years, I may love a different set of books. Is it not possible that I’d miss ‘dispensable’ ones the most? I cannot guarantee that I will not turn into an old woman who likes nothing better than the time-pass reads of her childhood and teenage years.
There was no other way but to save everything. So I lifted a metal trunk and put it on top of the bed. I pulled out the books from the last two shelves and placed them on the trunk. Now all the books were two feet off the ground, as safe as I could leave them.
What remains of this story is one last bookish decision. I was stepping out to go to my uncle’s house. My head was ringing with the memory of a bad dream from a few days ago. In the dream, the whole city was flooded again. One of my favourite film directors was standing knee-deep in water, as I floated on a raft made entirely of old plastic bottles. I was crying, telling him that I cannot swim.
I wondered if the dream was a premonition and the flood would be as bad as 2005. Teenage boys were playing cricket on the street. The sewage-tainted floodwater was already waist-high. One of these boys would later lift his shirt to show me a nipple piercing as I waded through the muck. But before I set out, I worried about what book to take along to read on the train or bus. What if I fell into the water and couldn’t get up? If some kind soul got me to a hospital, he’d surely open my bag to find a phone or address book. He’d see what I was reading. I felt I ought to think about that.
I shall not name the books I wouldn’t be caught dead with. But I will admit that I did not want to be caught dead with an ‘educate me’ book. It would be too much of a statement, rather than just plain honest reading. Finally, I settled on poetry, as I had known I would. For life and in preparation for death, and for everything in between – poetry.
