I was at a wedding in February when I learned something new about my dada – that he was a voracious reader, and a lover of arts and culture. I never got to meet him, so I was moved by this tidbit. What could I have learned from him? What could we have exchanged ideas about? Thus far I'd known of him as a dental surgeon, albeit one who had made a multi-generational family tree. This was a whole new world opening up.
As I stuffed my face with food, I also learned that my dadi, whom I've also never met, was a reader too, and encouraged this habit in her children. She took them out to watch a play every month. She insisted that they read or borrow at least one book in Hindi when they visited the Dilli Public Library opposite the old Delhi railway station. No wonder, then, that my dad and his siblings enjoy reading. Incidentally, the library, which dates back to the 1950s, also has a mobile version in the form of buses – yes, has, not had, and I didn't know until now! They're still around! Pictured above in the 1960s.*
What was more familiar to me was this library, the most colourful room in my maternal grandparents' home up in the Himalayas in the middle of nowhere. It's what I always imagined book lovers lived like. On the left are encyclopaedias and reference books for every subject imaginable, from photography to medicine. On the right is fiction and poetry. I'm not sure if I've ever actually sat and finished a single book from this collection while I was there, but I've browsed many of them. In the age of Google, the internet didn't make many inroads here, and it was surreal to be looking things up alphabetically in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (Yes, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was indeed written by Stevenson, as I'd suspected.)
What's the origin story of this collection, you might wonder. Well, in 1958, my grandfather bought the contents of an entire bookshop. The owner of the People's Bookshop in Assam was shocked at first, then grateful; henceforth, he would run to my nana every time he had new stock. I imagine the rest of the collection was built gradually, but was sizeable by the late 1960s, when my mother remembers ginormous trunks of books being transported up the mountain, though she isn't sure how.
My nana's brother, Uncle Kushi, who I've met more than my grandfather, has another bookshop story. Years before he built his library, my nana perhaps dreamed of it, but acted upon this in somewhat unfortunate ways. Their family lived in Ferozepur, near the India-Pakistan border, in the 1940s and '50s. The details are slightly fuzzy, but the brothers, and I think an accomplice, once took over a bookshop there bank-robber style. One of them (I'm pretty sure it was my grandfather; only he would have the confidence, and, let's face it, the idea) produced a gun (?!), while the others took possession of some...books. "It was pilfering," Uncle Kushi clarified with a grin, "not stealing."
I bet the bookshop owner would beg to differ.
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*Images via Zikr-e-Dilli/Flickr.
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