Friday Poetry: The Poetry of Silent Trees

Trees

which had been silent

all this while

have now decided to speak:

their poetry blooms under my feet,

and I listen carefully,

not wishing to miss

a single

syllable.

Of 'The Girl Who Ate Books,' Bookstores, and Browsing

Last week, I finally got around to ordering a bunch of books I had been wanting to read for a long while; one of them happened to be the acclaimed journalist, author, and columnist, Nilanjana Roy's book, The Girl Who Ate Books. I had heard a great deal about Ms. Roy and had even seen her in person, moderating a panel which included Taslima Nasreen among other authors at the Times Literature Festival held in Delhi last December. Yet, it was one thing to hear of and read an author in a column and another to read their book, which happens to be a series of superlative, elegantly written essays about being a bibliophagist (and quite literally so!), house of books (in her case, her grandmother's ancestral Calcutta home, where books were scattered, stacked, and shelved in every possible space), reading, encounters with authors and poets, her own writing, sensitive, thoughtful notes on plagiarism and more. The last time I had read such a nuanced treatise and musings on reading was when I read Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris, which incidentally is a book that Ms. Roy also refers to in her own.

It made me deeply think about reading: how and why I read - and of course, books which have played a central role in my life. Reading about Ms. Roy's childhood reading experiences and bookshops she frequented over the years, I journeyed back into my own childhood in Oman and how I acquired my books and satiated my voracious reading appetite. I read a lot and there were only so many outlets from where I could replenish the constantly diminishing stack of books I consumed. There being not much of a reading culture in Oman, there was only one local bookshop chain, Family Bookshop, where the limited range of books in the few branches gleamed shiny, new-smelling, and very expensive, as everything imported in Oman was. While I borrowed a huge number of books from our school library (one year, the librarian informed me, I was the student who had borrowed the highest number of books that year: 333, to be precise!), we also had the option of ordering books through publishers' catalogues such as a British children's imprint of Penguin, Puffin and an American children publishing house, Scholastic. The books arrived by sea-mail and took months to arrive and I almost forgot that I had ordered them until a huge box would turn up in our class room - and you remembered all those books, awaiting to be read. I would devour the books within hours of acquiring them before immediately re-reading them, a habit that still persists till this day with many of the books I read. They would finally be given a precious place of honor in my shrine of books, the book-shelf  - and indeed, many of the books I read as a child still remain in my bookshelves at my parents' home.

Other than that, I bought a lot of books at school fests or book sales or especially when we traveled to India or abroad, where I literally had to be pried away from the bookstores; for example, when I was thirteen and a cousin of mine took me to Borders bookshop in a suburban New Jersey mall, it took me a long time to delightedly comprehend that there was a store where you could sit down and read  books - and no one would be around to shake their head or ask you to stop reading. It was probably my most favorite store that I encountered during that trip.

What always pierced through me while browsing at the bookshops was the dizzying incredible realisation that there were so many books waiting to be read and I had gotten around to reading just a few. There is a scene in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy where the two protagonists, Lata and Kabir meet in a bookstore and Lata and Kabir's eye collide when Lata, who normally gravitates towards poetry, particularly Tennyson, is lost in the mysteries of mathematics; Seth particularly emphasizes her awe at the multiple continents of knowledge waiting to be discovered and explored. As I grow older, I have to admit that I have a disappointing habit of stubbornly remaining within my reading comfort zones; however, once I do venture out of them, I happily lose myself into a novel which delights in playing with toys of language or transplants me in a meticulously re-created historical era and ethos. A few years ago, when I was still living in Oman, a group of neighborhood ladies and I would meet for monthly book-club evenings, where we would bring our favorite books and exchange them with the others; given the paucity of bookshops in Oman, it was a god-send to discover authors and books that I would never have otherwise heard of.

I have to confess that it was not until recently when I was reading about the demise of some much-loved bookstores in Delhi that I realised I had both forgotten the act of browsing as well as the joy I derived from them, thanks to so much online book-shopping I now indulge in and which is my primary mode of purchasing books nowadays. When I lived in Pittsburgh and greedily ransacked the Carnegie Library every week to borrow books, I would still browse but didn't linger too much, always eager to rush home and start reading the books I had borrowed, knowing that I would have to return them soon. However, when I found myself in bookshops, knowing that I was going to actually invest in a book, knowing that it would be mine and which would decorate my shelves or bedside table for years to come, I would deliciously linger over the browsing, taking my time to leaf through the books. And so, when I had some time to myself weeks ago, I slipped into a bookstore and took my time walking around the store, pulling out a book or two, flipping through the pages, allowing an eloquently written passage to brand my memory. I had taken this luxury for granted, unknowing it was a luxury until it became one.

Friday Poetry: Beauties Sleeping

BEAUTIES SLEEPING

Beauties sleeping,

dreaming of pink bloom,

unaware that they are ghosts of

what they once were,

what they will never be again.

 

Five Thoughts About April

1. I began a collaging-scrap book which is becoming a novel of my thoughts. I also painted a bit more this month, specifically expanding on my love for dots; I don't know where it has sprung up from, this inclination towards embedding the page with dots but it is a very calm, meditative process and imbues the painting with a strange, structured quality. Here is a third such chapter from my book: The Art of Cloud-Making.

2. I attended my first art event in ages and surprisingly, only my second one in Delhi after all this time living here, what with its uber-packed art and culture calendar. It was the closing ceremony of  multi-media and disciplinary artist, Satish Gupta's At The Feet of Buddha, where he presented ten sculptures, eight paintings and seventy two haikus. We heard Buddhist monks in orange robes chant, renowned Indologist, a venerable looking Professor Chandra in a crisp white kurta and dhoti talk about Buddhism, saying something which particularly resonated me that Buddha saw the entire universe in a leaf, and finally, the artist himself reciting his haikus. The giant contemplative Buddha was the focus of everyone's attention, mogras buds scenting the air all around him. We briefly chatted to the artist and he told us that it took him two years to wrought it. I have to say though  that my favorite part of the evening was hearing his wonderful haikus; read them here and here.

3. Time to blow my trumpet a bit! I wrote a piece about my love for the trees in spring-time on a whim inspired by a beautiful writing cue, participating in a writing competition for the first time in years (another first!). To my pleasant surprise, my entry was among the five winning entries for this month. You can read the piece here:)

4.  My abandoned sofa trail saw me spotting one in Mehrauli after almost a year since my last sighting in Delhi; it was unobtrusively hidden in a tangle of forest and scrub, its extremely dilapidated state indicating that it had been there for a while, almost becoming a part of the forest itself. It looked so at home in the spot, if one could say, that I wasn't tempted to extricate its back-story. This was its story.

5. It's the season of mogras once again. I bought a string or two from my local flower-seller and wrote about a poem about it, kickstarting my Friday poetry posts. The other evening, sitting inside the car and waiting for the traffic light to turn green, a man swung an entire bunch in front of us and offered to sell them for a bargain. "I need to go home and get rid of them," he succinctly told us. I had been planning to buy a couple of strings and so immediately leaped at the chance to buy a bunch of gorgeous-smelling mogra. Since then, they swayed on the rearview mirror, scented my living and bedrooms, and are now slumbering in the cold, protected confines of the fridge.

How was your April? I would love to hear!