Fractional Distillates - 2

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Yesterday we talked about the Bitumen grade of book-rooks. They are all book-haters willy-nilly whether they admit it or not. Autocrat said that those who haven't handled books in their infancy and childhood will never get over their fear of books. It is like Diwali crackers. The converse is not true though. I have seen kids who have grown up in a vast home-library giving them a miss. This has to do with a certain imbibed confidence that when time comes (whenever it is, if ever) they can always start reading them...not to hurry and worry now...meanwhile let us play golies, gulli-danda, looko-chori, and a while later, chase the girls...

There is also this phenomenon of the parents forcing their kids to read them...anything forced in the childhood breeds an aversion, like castor oil. My Father, bless his soul, was aware of this. So, although we didn't have a home-library, he used to surreptitiously throw good school-library books here and there within my reach; and perhaps watch if I get curious what is there in them. I clearly remember one afternoon when he was ironing our dresses, I brought the Collected Works of Oscar Wilde and started reading his short pieces like the Happy Prince, Nightingale and the Rose, and Selfish Giant (I was too young to understand his Picture of Dorian Gray although I did wade through it). And after reading his stories, I remarked aloud: "Oscar Wilde's stories are very sentimental". He laughed and corrected me: "Sentimental is a negative word...the right word is, 'lyrical'..."


Anyway, the next lighter distillate is: Fuel Oil.


Folks who belong to this category can be called: Book-Case Lovers.


As soon as I entered my M.D. Uncle's drawing room, the first thing that struck me was a fairly vast book-shelf with glass doors so that any visitor could see his Collection and also read the titles. I happened to live in his home for two years. First I was afraid if I could take them out and read them. After a week, I made bold and asked Auntie if I can take down Uncle's books and read them...backdoor diplomacy.


She eventually said, "Yes, but be careful not to soil them and never lend them to your friends." This is  the typical psychology of a book-case lover...he treats them as his bone-china collection...fragile... like, 

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_china





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And then I was spoilt for choice. There was this Collected Works of Shakespeare (two volumes). PGW said he would give a thousands pounds sterling for anyone who read them through. While he was visiting Paris, the Germans captured it in WW2 and were rounding up all enemy intellectuals to imprison them in a fairly decent accommodation to show off their magnanimity. PGW, being a dreamy-eyed Lord Emsworth, was made to broadcast how well the Germans treated their prisoners and got into hot waters. Anyway, he was given an hour to pack up his essential possessions and march. He picked up the two Volumes of the Bard mentioned above with a desire to read them now that he had got the chance of a whale of leisure. And he wrote that the two volumes stacked one above the other made great pillows in the prison. I too gave them a miss.

But there was this Collected Works of Conan Doyle, which I waded through in those two years...not only Holmes but the Challenger Stories and in particular the Lost World, the theme of which preceded the movie Jurassic Park by almost a century. And then many PGWs and Somerset Maugham...I could sense that I was the first reader...you can always tell if a book has been thumbed earlier. Books are like cotton shirts of our youth...wear them once and they crumple. And several of the pages stick to one another and you have to use a blade to take them apart. There was this great feeling of achievement deflowering a book fresh from the printer.

The trouble with my MD Uncle and his likes those days was that from the day they entered their Medical College to the day when they got their MD eight or nine years later, they were so overloaded with the professional tomes they had to mug up that they never had any leisure to read anything else during their prime youth. But Vizagh being a University town, the medicos were living amidst University students and faculty who not only have too much leisure but outside reading was sort of essential for them to compete in the Exams for IFS, IAS etc. So they keep hearing words like Maugham and Jane Austen and Emile Zola and Jean Paul Sartre...and the pressure tells.

My youngest sister (52 then) visited our home once and saw with awe my book-shelf with its depleted survivors of KGP. And remarked in ecstasy: "I always wanted a glass-plated book-case in my Drawing Room, but it is so tiny that after arranging the sofa, center piece, diwan, TV stand, Home Theater, shoe-rack, telephone table and sundry other items, there never was any space for a decent book-case."

And I had to tell her:

"The place for a book-shelf is not the drawing room but the bedroom"

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