Bookache

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When a man turns old (no one GROWS old) and has ample leisure to dream (preferably on an empty stomach), his dreams tend to return to his boyhood (I don't know about women; my wife says she never dreams).

This is most vividly described in that Nobel-Winning Long Poem: The Old Man and the Sea............

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".......He was asleep in a short time and he dreamed of Africa when he was a boy and the long golden beaches and the white beaches, so white they hurt your eyes, and the high capes and the great brown mountains...........and then he dreamed of the different harbors and roadsteads of the Canary Islands. He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and of the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them..................."

Courtesy: http://www.asiaing.com/the-old-man-and-the-sea.html

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For five years as a boy I lived in a seaside Village and then for another seven years as a teenager in a seaside Town. There were no lions on my beaches but there was sand alright...enough sand to light up the sunny Village and the Town for decades if only one could get its silicon out with enough purity.

If you live by the Sea that long, you get to know all its moods more than you know the moods of your thirty-year-life-partner.

Well, I am not going to talk of Sea but of Books now (Sea can wait; it isn't easily torn apart or sold as raddi).

The Old Man realizes that there has been a first in his long life for every ache, every lie, every sin, every bliss and every defeat. They are special. There will be many more later in each set but they don't count. As I said in my Seven Ages of (Lying) Man, they are pure routine:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2009/10/seven-ages-of-lying-man.html

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As I relive my school days, as you know I often do, I recall my first good English Reader in Class VIII. As I said in Get-Up Please!, it was a very well got-up book with a fascinating Cover Picture of the Coromandel Coast (sea-beach again with swinging palm trees):

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2010/07/get-up-please.html

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The first lesson was: "Tuck's Dream".

Tuck is this small playful naughty boy in a new big school, and the night before his first Exam, he didn't have time enough to read the last lesson in his school book. As he vaguely recalls from his Class it was a tiny travelogue in Egypt. That was all he knew about it.

He gets sleepy and scared and hides the book under his pillow before falling asleep. As you can guess, a Fairy duly appears in his dream and flies Tuck on a sky-ride to all those places in the lesson narrating all about them. (And there was this picture of the 'Exam Fairy' carrying Tuck in the skies on her wings in the book). Very like the 'Tooth Fairy' legend.

And next day the lesson is in his Question Paper; Tuck writes it well and scores high.

As you can guess again, from then on till now I always have a book under my pillow or beside it. And if it is beside the pillow, like Jogia's sumptuous gift of the American Edition of Thurber Album has been for the last 5 years, I hide it under the mattress as soon as I see nine-month-old Ishani being launched on my bed on her biblio-lacero spree. I let her tear to her heart's content some other available books like my Tall Tales for Ishani, of which I have a few extra copies tucked away in our Godrej Almirah, supposedly for her chewing later in life.

And the last lesson in our Coromandel Reader was the poem I talked of so many times: Rainbow by Christina Rosetti. I didn't care much for the poem, but the haunting picture that accompanied it of a sole boatman on a rippling river ferrying his boat under a designer bridge with a shiny multi-colored rainbow spanning Heaven and Earth.

During every 4-month monsoon season at KGP there were at least half a dozen glorious rainbows which many miss. But I was outdoors most of the time enjoying the KGP monsoon skies, either under the Canteen Mango Tree or on Harry's Cement Bench or in my armchair in the verandah of B-140 and I never missed the Evening 5 O'clock Rainbow Show.

And that always took me back to my Coromandel Reader.

And after I was promoted to Class IX, my younger sister and then her sister and then hers....inherited the book for their use.

Till I returned from College one day and was looking for it.

I was coolly told that a newer and much better book has been prescribed that year and my old and frayed Coromandel Reader has been sold to the Raddiwala.

That was my first heartache and also first bookache.

Can a new book (or a new baby) serve as replacement for the older one sold to the Raddiwala?

Can anyone PLEASE get me back my old Coromandel Reader (the one I fondled and dandled)?

I can pay my one-month pension. For an unemployed pensioner without private means that is something!

RKN was wiser. He says he kept his favorite Nelson Reader (away from his youngest brother RKL?) for 40 years and fondles and dandles it once in every while.

And he too must have been hiding it under his mattress whenever his Ishani (Minnie) was launched on his bed!

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Just now my Binder's boy delivered my 40-year-old Dorothy Parker. I had covered the Penguin Paperback firmly with a brown paper and I had no clue yesterday what the original cover looked like. The Binder unwrapped and threw away the brown-paper and covered the newly bound copy with its intact Penguin Cover.

O Great! Now I recall; it has this lovely picture of this undying fan of Hemingway with a fag in its long holder (popular in the 70s when the Penguin thing was brought out). The filament of smoke from the fag goes snaking up like a cobra with her pen's venomous nib as its head. The book has 600 pages, now turned brown and fragile, and must have cost me less than Rs 10.

The Binder did a fantastic job for a well-deserved Rs 100.

Give it to Hyderabad....you can get Quality (if you have the moolah)


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