Books & Stagnant Brooks

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Myself and my eventual Ph D Guide SDM joined IIT KGP in 1965: he as a Senior Professor and me as a Junior Lecturer. It was his last decade of service and my first. He retired in 1975.

Ever since he joined KGP we used to see that he was getting by Post fat issues of the prestigious Journal 'Mathematical Reviews', published by the American Mathematical Society. Since there was no way he or any individual buying these expensive elephants, we concluded that he must be getting them free for being chosen as one of its Honored Reviewers.

When he retired from KGP out of his vast and spacious A-type Bungalow, we wondered how he would be able to shrink to the inevitable cramped apartment in Calcutta, bought or rented (I know now!). It is like the Camel of the 'Sermon on the Mount' trying to pass through the eye of that needle.

Since he was a lover of books and had a keen sense of humor, I myself gifted him a Thurber-Wodehouse set which he relished like a child. So, we guessed that whatever furniture and goods he might give away, he would carry his books; and we were not wrong.

I was a bachelor at that time waiting to get married and living in a C1 type Bungalow, which had practically no furniture and its Hall very like a football field. He knew this since he used to make surprise visits to my den to discus some point of Physics or the other (I had a framed picture of Ramana Maharshi whom I sort of admired. He once looked at it and asked if it was my father, to which I coolly replied: 'grandfather'; and then he asked what happened to that Lamy Equation that he dumped in my lap).

A week before he left the Campus, he called me to his Quarters and requested (ordered) me to safe-keep some books of his in my spacious Qrs till he could shift them to Calcutta. And he led me to a vast sea of bound volumes of Mathematical Reviews. Like the Daffodils of Wordsworth, I saw a ten thousand at a glance and shuddered.

Being the simpleton he was, I could see that he went to the expense of getting them bound in the Library Journal fashion, Volume per Volume in leather. He must have spent a large part of his meager salary on this.

I fetched my Rickshaw-Puller, Maninder, who looked at the pile and said he would need at least 3 trips and a good blackmail money. For the moment I asked him to dump them on the floor of my Hall.

Whenever I looked at it, the dump seemed to grow like sin in my inner eye and I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to safe-keep them from 'ratification, termtitination and verminization' as long as they resided on the damp KGP floor. So I went to my friend, the Manager of the Faculty Hostel and asked him if I could borrow a huge Table that is strong enough to withstand a ton of books. He said ok with the proviso that I have to return it when he himself retires a decade later to get his: 'No-Dues Certificate'. Nice of him. So the 100 odd volumes were uploaded onto the bare Table by Maninder, awaiting the Command from SDM that I arrange to shift them to Calcutta.

A Commandment that never came!

I used to remind him of his legacy from time to time at intervals of six months or so by Post Card, to which he would probe what happened to the solution of that Lamy Equation; a silencing tactic on both sides.

When my wife joined me she wanted that Table badly since it could serve as a make-shift Dining Table. Then I had to do a 'Cost-Benefit Analysis' and say ok to her: Food for the stomach takes precedence over food for thought.

So, Maninder was engaged, this time, to upload the bound volumes of SDM to the Attic.

A decade later, I knew that SDM can no longer afford to shift them to his tiny flat at Calcutta nor ask me to destroy them, sell them as junk, or keep them forever till I retire 3 decades later, in which case he had to make a Will.

Typical SDM Conundrum.

Sometimes my brain works wonders.

I wrote to him to permit me to donate this complete set of Mathematical Reviews of 25 years to our Central Library which both of us loved and of which he was a Chairman for a 3-year term. I knew he would jump at it.

He did!

But my troubles merely started then: The Ma'am-in-Charge of 'Acquisition' asked me to go to hell when I proposed this gracious Donation from her ex-Chairman. She said they already have a set of this Collection and they have absolutely no space for a Duplicate, space-crunch being what it is. And she told me off saying that it would set a bad precedent as she would be flooded with all sorts of books donated by all sorts of retirees (meaning me too), and who would catalog them, shift them, track them and what not; the staff crunch being what it was.

I saw her point.

When I returned home my heart was sinking. Then I did something I had never done at IIT KGP: "Pull Strings". Professor SHR, a book-lover himself and the current Chairman of the Central Library happened to have a wife who was a distant cousin of my own wife.

So, you see the Game!

The Libarary Committee duly met and resolved to 'accept' SDM's Donation as a 'one-time-gift-not-to-be-quoted-as-a-precedent'.

The Ma'am at the Library never forgave me and I had to hide from her when our paths crossed in the alleys and by-lanes of our hallowed Central Library which till then was my 'home-away-from-home'.

And before shifting them to the Library (via Maninder) I thought I would make a rubber stamp: 'Donated by Professor S Datta Majumdar', buy a stamp-pad and ink.

When I brought this set home, my 5-year-old son took over and I happily outsourced the 'stamping work' to him.

After the job was done and all of us heaved several sighs of relief, I found that my son started stamping all my books, his books and the other Library books I borrowed before I could stop him.

I grabbed the rubber stamp from his hands, carried him on my scooter to the Lake, and gave him the utmost pleasure of throwing the damn thing as far as he could in its placid waters.

Returning home, I dreamed that one of our fishermen of the Technology Angling Society netted this stamp and gave it as a gift to his son, who started stamping his School books and his dad's books:

"Donated by Professor S Datta Majumdar".

And I woke up to the one and only genuine laughter this Deal ever gave me.

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