Just recently I cleared and cleaned my daughter’s cupboard and found myself sitting within huge piles of books and magazines – many Tintins, Enid Blyton and Nancy Drews, Chicken Soup Series, Mills and Boons, Jeffry Archer, Paul Coelho, Khaled Hosseni, Emile Brite, Salman Rushdie (which none of us ever finished) and Neil Gaiman and many more. These are not merely books. This is the whole story of the journey of my little girl to womanhood.
Sitting with these books I remembered the huge stock of books from my childhood. A part of which is still preserved in our ancestral house. If I close my eyes, I can smell those books.Can you smell a book? I can tell you – yes I actually can. Old and new books smell differently. Any avid book lover can confirm my claim. Some of the classics your parents received on their wedding anniversary smell different from the Jhoompa Lahiri or Arudhanti Roy you purchased just ten years back.
Holding the family’s prized possession - thick, yellow jacketed, heavy Ramayan by Krittiwas Ojha feels completely different from flipping through the Ram, Sita and Ravana series by Amish Tripathy.
Once you develop an affinity towards books, they become a part of you, your family. It’s very hard to discard books I feel. Even for those who has successfully adapted to reading on backlit screens. Books are not just paper and words, they are made of sentiments, and feelings and smells.
In contrast to the nostalgia of old books, and the two prominent libraries of our small town that made me a reader, I recall as fondly the excitement of smelling the fresh books at annual Book Fairs.
A book fair felt like paradise, where under the winter sun, makeshift tents held stories from across the country and our neighbouring countries. Stories of adventure, mystery, romance, horror, science and tragedy. Or politics, great leader, geography and enclycopedias. Or anything else that caught your fancy. In any language you wanted. Tents with books of all shapes and sizes waiting to be picked up with care. You could take a few rounds, browse through many and bring back a few. And get a snack at the food stalls on the way out. Especially if you happened to be at the Calcutta Book Fair, the food stalls would be as crowded as the book stalls. A book fair was the most magic one could experience in a pre- internet world. A book fair is why I knew before Google happened about the Masai tribe and Anton Chekov.
I have not been able to discard of any of our books, though I see slowly for convenience sake, I am using my Kindle more and more. I feel a little bit sad to not see the younger generation hold book very often, I only see the backs of their devices and never know what they are reading. There exists a larger conversation about the environment and paper of course, I hope we find sustainable ways of retaining the joy the books. I have decided, I will gift the younger ones around me books when occasions arise. Meanwhile, I may use the Kindle, but the book shelf in my house remains in sparkling condition with books I am happy to lend.
The writer is a retired bank officer and the views expressed in the article are her own.