Nov 04 2013, 2115 hrs IST
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking” — Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
At times, when utter despair gets to me and everything in the world seems meaningless and empty, it’s only the love of books that cheers me. From a very early age, my relationship with books is visceral and intense. A familiar shiver of thrill creeps up my spine as I turn the pages of my favourite books. The words seem reassuring, even if they do not exactly address my immediate issues. They seem to create that small window in Alice in Wonderland’s world, which opens out to a big, bright world.
I have spent many a summer afternoons in my hometown Kolkata hiding inside the fantastic world of books. I would be enamoured with what was likely my fresh experience with strange lands, strange people and strange customs. I loved the fancy illustrations on the cover page. Each time, the experience would drive a rivulet into my brain that pushed me past what I’d known was possible and into a place I had not known existed. Stories were in a way a form of escapism, running away from the real world, real issues, and real people.
Yet books would always be a sort of a healer and take me towards my essential self. They would help open up blockages of my being and teach me to breathe deeply. They also made me more inward-looking as a person and more connected with my soul. I would always write my name, date, time and place of a new book on the first page and sometimes leave a note too explaining the situation in which I bought it. Years later, I would always read those with a lingering feeling of nostalgia. I would be amused by some weird circumstances in which I had to buy that book or an unlikely place from which I picked it up. I can’t imagine my life without books now. They are my best companions and partners in crime.
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