“Two pages,” I glumly say.
A lane in Kolkata, speckled with beguiling characters, was to be the site of my masterpiece. A few hundred words in – this was many years ago – and my rivulet of ideas clotted. Yu is encouraging. Persist, she says, and then something wondrous happens. Right there, over lunch, she conjures up multiple strands of stories, which could emerge from my street. She’s giving me suggestions by miraculously stitching stories out of the air.
The journalist crafts material derived from interviews in the real world. The writer imagines worlds, summons plots from caves in the brain and uses words like X-rays, as Aldous Huxley imagined them. “They’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
That moment with Yu was more than rewarding, it was somehow reassuring. I’d been in a grumpy mood, for bookshops were closing and my nine-year-old granddaughter wasn’t reading (a problem currently being addressed with bribery).
Was the world being rewired? Did humans not have time for written words any more?
But books survive, they always have. “In Czechoslovakia after the Communist takeover,” states the book, The Library: A Fragile History, “27.5 million books were removed from public libraries.” But even as we ban them, burn them, subjugate entire cultures through the deletion of words, books endure because ideas and readers do.
Humans still lean towards curiosity. We still fall in love – a colleague has – on the basis of another’s bookshelf. We still wander into airport bookshops – a boarding card is built to slide between pages – even though they’re desiccated. We still weep alone – as Yu has done – over a page, not because the subject is moving but because a paragraph is exquisitely crafted.
I take photographs of pages because they trigger a thought. Like one from Ian Urbina’s The Outlaw Ocean where he writes, “I came to admire mariners’ quiet self-possession and their comfort with these long silences... over time, I also came to respect the silence itself.” In a clamouring world, books still offer us this soundless escape.
We all come to words from different places before they become comfort, companion, refuge. Yu’s journey to them was painful. Parts of her body, like her knees, dislocate easily and in school fellow students could be cruel. “They purposely make you dislocate so that you are in pain,” she remembers, “and they disrupt the class.” So she’d get sent to the senior assistant’s room where there was a bed but also a shelf of books.
“So I’d get to sit there and read and read and read and read.”
And then one day she wrote.
Those who love books
My lunch with Yu, a relaxed wander through words, made me seek out kindred spirits.
There are more book people out there than one thinks. There’s HC, my colleague, who I collide with in corridors once in a while. “When I die,” she suddenly and plaintively asked last week, “who will want them?”
Of all the things we’ve carried through an entire life, books are often one of them. When we pass on, so will the very things which helped us live. As Susan Orlean wrote in The Library Book: “In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned.”
Everywhere stories were being exchanged. Yu told me about a book market in Iraq which isn’t locked at night, the shopkeepers sustained, she said, by an ancient belief: “People who steal don’t read and the people who read don’t steal.” I sent a friend a link to a New York Times story on reading parties where, as they wrote, “the premise is simple: Show up with a book, commit to vanquishing a chapter or two and chat with strangers about what you’ve just read”.
Some folks prefer libraries, others turn pages, notate, leave books open and fear book orthopaedists who give lectures on how spines are being harmed. ST PHOTO: KUA CHEE SIONG
Maybe we can’t convert people, but we can sustain each other. If not read stories together, then tell each other tales of how we read.
Do you have a reading place, a time, a position? My mother, before her stroke, sat at the edge of her bed, her back straight enough to satisfy a sergeant-major, a study in stillness. I need a footstool, the curtains drawn, the phone silent.
I am single and mostly untroubled; Yu has the advantage of a sensitive spouse. “He watches Netflix with his headphones on so I can read.”
So many little conversations on books I’ve had this year, so many insights found and peculiarities grinned at. Each one comforts me. My colleague, LS, says the books her friends recommend “tell me who they are and who they think I am”. A friend, MS, buys multiple copies of the same book to give to others.
Some folks prefer libraries, others – perhaps privileged like me – turn pages, notate, leave books open and fear book orthopaedists who give lectures on how spines are being harmed.
There’s also an insufferable snob inside me, which Yu rightly punctured. How can you listen to a book, I griped, to which she replied with a question: Where did the stories come from?
“Around a campfire,” she answered herself. It is all, as always, in the telling.
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Wonder and inquisitiveness
Maybe the news isn’t as grim as I thought. Maybe I should have more faith in the adventuring of humans. Maybe on those phones in the bus is not just Taylor Swift warbling but what Paralympic swimmer Yip Pin Xiu is reading, which is Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air. Maybe in the conversation between two nonagenarians lies a clue to what we might be talking about in the future.
In the 1950s, two young literature students met in university and among the opening sentences of their first conversation was “Do you love the Russians?” This was no Cold War query but an inquiry about Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin.
Whenever we’re glum about bookshops closing and kids who won’t read, there’s always a little story from a reader (or a writer) to lift our spirits. PHOTO: ST FILE
Both ladies went on to do their master’s and now, 70 years on, with voices croaky but enthusiasm undimmed, their occasional phone calls across cities invariably return to their starting point. These days, I am told, the subject is crime novels.
It’s lovely, this tale, isn’t it? All of us separated by taste and age and borders, yet tied by inquisitiveness, together accessing the universe through assorted avenues, seeking escape, wonder, entertainment or just a way to understand the world with more clarity. What is it about book people, I asked Mr Kenny Chan, consultant to Kinokuniya, a place that feels more than a shop, a time machine, perhaps, an oasis, a grand rock withstanding the erosion of the tides. Book people, Mr Chan smiled down the phone, “believe all characters we read are real, and when they suffer we feel it forever”.
Mr Chan is an evangelist and I am grateful for him and for all those voices which carry books to each other; for those who speak of the smell of bookshelves; for those who leave behind novels in old guest houses in the hills for the next guest; for those who tell people who don’t read, here, just try this; for those who unknowingly give oxygen to this thing we always fear is dying.
Palestinians retrieving books from the rubble of an Israeli bombardment around Rafah in southern Gaza. PHOTO: AFP
This weekend I will be in India, at the home of a friend and maybe I will hear what she occasionally does. A sound carried on a delightful breeze from the other room, which makes her smile. Her mother, 89, is losing her eyesight and so my friend’s sister sits with her and reads to her.
Two women travelling together through a book, filling a room with love and laughter.
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