The oldest friend

The oldest friend 

Lockdown gave me a bonanza of surplus time to read. My Kindle device has 3 books open. My average at present is 3 books a week. I have demolished the Russian, French and Chinese revolutions, British Monarchy, British Raj in India, Partition, and India after Gandhi and Nehru. I have knocked off hundreds of biographies; from Ramnath Goenka to BK Nehru, VP Menon to Katharine Graham, Shah Rukh Khan to PM Modi, to Gulzar. 

I am a creature of habit so I read at fixed places and at fixed timings. The last slot is 9 pm to 10.30 pm when I am also listening to popular Hindi film songs on the radio. 

Reading is my oldest friend, circa 1961. I attribute my zest for reading to our family servant, who taught me how to read during his siesta time. 

My family could not afford a newspaper, so I fetched one from our neighbors. I scanned the headlines of the paper even when nothing made sense to a 10-year-old me. 

I borrowed children’s magazines from a paper vendor who allowed me to buy one and replace it with older ones if I returned on the same day. I finished quite a few in a single day. 

My school gave me first access to the library, followed by a public library that opened soon in our town. This gave a fresh start and an enchanting dimension to my life. I devoured all the Gujarati children's books I could find in the library. 

I lived in a sprawling house full of winding staircases, hidden floors, and undiscovered nooks and crannies. I would hide among this jumble to enjoy uninterrupted reading. 

Someone had introduced me to erotic books by the time I was 15. I had to struggle to find even more deeply hidden places to read those books. 

 By the time we entered college, I had read all the crown jewels of Gujarati writers of the 1960s and 1970s. Their writings on contemporary social milieu, and shaped our young, eager, and rebellious minds. 

English books did not enter our lives until after college where the medium of study was Gujarati. 

James Headily Chase was the first English author on our reading list, followed by Perry Mason. We had to borrow, beg, and steal books, since buying books was not an option. 

Romance with the books continued, and the books kept a central role in my life. My passion did not distinguish what I read; old books, new books, bound or paperback, new or torn, Gujarati or English, classic or vulgar. Books became my life and remain even today. 

My propensity to read books went up as I traveled. I would knock off big, bulky books on long flights; books by Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy read at one go in nonstop Dubai - Houston or Paris - Rio flights. 

 Books were my sole companions in locked hotel rooms in cities like Khartoum or Caracas where no one ventures step out in the evenings. I liked hotels that kept books in rooms or in a lobby. 

 I loved Serena Hotel Nairobi for providing a freshly printed digest of international news on your breakfast table. They printed these in menu size format, easy to keep on your table while you butter your toast. 

 As they say "there is no one more pitiable than a person locked into a room on a rainy afternoon and does not like reading". 

 I am glad to be not that person.

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