That love for books...

 

I had woken up today at 6am for a change. After all, it was a Saturday. All foggy, the wintry May morning was anticipating the morning sun to rise, just like me. In the meanwhile, I was getting ready with the excitement of a 10-year-old boy. For I was planning to go to a bookfair.

By the time the sun had woke up and warmed the frigid morn, I was ready and walking to the station, all tucked in, in woolly comfort. One metro ride, followed by a train and I was to reach the suburb hosting the fair. Which was nothing too spectacular, let’s be honest. Housed in a somewhat large hall, it was a noble fundraiser - a quarterly affair that raised funds from the sale of used books. As a booklover, though, the event was exciting – the experience of going through piles of books, neatly classified by sections, recognising a few common titles, discovering some never-before-seen titles was stimulating indeed. In the travel section, you could wander through half the globe in a basket laden with the typically blue-spined Lonely Planets. I picked up a book on Fiji – one more of thousand islands I dream of ticking someday, and another one on Angkor Wat – one more of the edifices of Greater India that I would one day  want to write a book on. Another 15 minutes of book-ransacking later, I had picked up a couple more on Australia and enviable train journeys. The hall was getting busier – busy in the biblichor, I had not noticed when the hall had filled up with people of every age group. It brought a smile under my mask, that people still care to ignore their endless Instagram feeds, to want to come and pick up a few used books in a nondescript suburb. I milled around some more, then checked out 6 books at an embarrassing price of $12 for all my treasures, then happily jaunted back in my bibliophilia to the train station.

There was something about the joy of holding a newly bought book that made the Saturday morning feel warmer. Waiting for the train, I couldn’t help think about the origin of this joy – faraway on another winter morning, but decades back in time, at the Kolkata Maidan. Now, THAT was a bookfair to talk about – like Tagore’s Babu of Nayanjore, I could easily have spent the entire day lauding what a bookfair it used to be. It was – still is - an annual affair held in late January, adding yet another laurel to Kolkata’s chilly but enjoyable wreath of winter. It still is Asia’s largest book fair, and the world’s third largest (after Frankfurt, and London) and reminds the city to retain its aantel attitude and keep devouring on the Chekovs and Austens.

As a teenager, growing in the 90s with very little exposure in an age devoid of internet and smartphones, the bookfair was an annual mecca worth waiting all year round. You were privileged to visit it only on a single day, and had a very strict budget, based on the largesse of your visiting grandparents and aunts round the year, every note and coin carefully added, counted and double counted in the wake to the start of the fair. After the end of the winter vacation, the Christmas and new year celebrations, it was the one thing that would lift your spirits, and to see its advertisement with its distinctive insignia of a child reading a book, would bring waves of euphoria and anticipation.

On the big day, obviously a weekend, the winter sun would inevitably shine on a cloudless sky, as if calling and tugging you to the sprawling Kolkata Maidan, wondering where would you rather be. Taking a relatively empty blue-and-yellow public bus was the start to the pilgrimage. By the time the bus would cross the Howrah bridge, turn towards the Esplanade area, the heart rate would double. When the bus would arrive at the iconic Park Street, the cantillating conductor would forsake prudish Park Street with ‘boi mela – boi mela – boi mela…’ And just like Santiago, you would know you have arrived at your much longed-for treasure in the chapel. You had to wait at an excessively long, serpentine queue before being allowed to enter the citadel of storybooks. Entering it was akin to migrating into a magical land via platform nine and three-quarters. Once inside the bastion of books, , you would understand the true meaning of ‘fair’ – here, the vast maidan would be hosting hundreds of canopied stalls, filled with millions of books, and thronged by thousands of people, dressed in winter attire, often including woollen mufflers and the Bangali’s shamelessly irreplaceable monkey-cap. Sprawling for acres you would hold a flimsy A3 page proudly showcasing all the bookstalls in the fair, completing all of which in a singe day would be a feat by itself. You would immediately scan the fine print in the bright sun to filter the best - one by one Oxford, Chakravorty Chatterjee, Penguin, India Book House, Family Bookshop and their elite ilk would surface to the top and you would form a mental map on the path of max returns, which also had to include the stall of the theme country for that year, even if you understood not a word of the country’s language and the books that would be showcased (how else would you show your aantlamo  the next day when you talked to your friends?)

The next hour would be a close encounter of the incomparable kind – as I said, this was the age when we had little – there was no wikipedia on your fingertips, and the school library would always feel impoverished. Perhaps it was the little that made us feel rich. Walking from stall to stall, and gleaming at books that we knew we couldn’t buy made us all feel like Oliver Twist, wanting for more. But so what the budget had limits, the mind, and heart had none, and we would go about voraciously turning through the pages, smelling the fresh crispness emanating from the volumes, some not even a couple of days old, and reading the summary in the book jackets. Over the years, Tintin and Asterix would give way to Rowling and Colfer, while the classics covered by the likes of RL Stevenson, Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie would keep a stable background in the montage of flowing words. Yet the feeling would be undiluted – an undying thirst to see more, learn more and read more, irrespective of age, gender, Ghoti or Bati.

The stimulation of the senses would also be replicated, thankfully, year after year, every year. Announcements in Bengali about that day’s events would intersperse melodious Rabindrasangeet songs subconsciously emphasizing your bangaliana, the dust of a thousand feet would cover up the maidan’s green grass (which eventually became the reason to move the maidan to a new smaller home around 2009), while many pilgrims weighed down by their omnibus and almanacs in their plastic and jhola bags, would sit down on makeshift mats, thanks to the A3 sized maps and other leaflets handed earlier. The fair would be embellished by other artists, painters, caricaturists, even musicians all welcomed heartily by the artistry of the bangali populace. And then, there would be the food. After the initial brouhaha of the bountiful books, it was time to give in to the dark side – and gorge on oily Benfish delicacies! You would be forgiven if you only bought a pamphlet instead of an encyclopedia, if you traded your Das Kapitals and Ulysses for a cheap Robert Langdon, if you didn’t even bother standing in the unimaginably long queue of Ananda publishers, but if you had skipped Benfish, you would be stripped of your bhodrolok status.

A few fish butter-fry later, you could indulge in a bit of candyfloss as well. And then, as the winter sun would start dipping towards the horizon, you would have earned your permission to leave. Your swollen feet, already complaining at the day’s labour, would still trundle to the last Rupa publisher stall where you could find that Kenneth Anderson book at a bigger discount, and you would throw in all your loose change to secure one final parting gift. Then, its winter once more, a blue and yellow bus back home (though giddy with excitement at the weight of the books in the plastic bags) , and a patient wait of another year, asche bochor aabar hobe…

The change in location to the faraway Salt Lake area did dampen the spirits and richness of many like me, for whom the Maidan was synonymous with boi mela. Yet over time, Calcuttans have overcome this change, re-emphasizing that at the end of the day, it’s the core value of the love for books that matters, the surrounding drapery can, and will change. It is that love that still drives a Calcuttan to College Street, in search of a rare out-of-print publication, while the Starmarks come and go, flooded by cheap shiny baubles these days instead of rich publications. It is that love with which a Calcuttan picks up a used book faraway at Victoria Terminus or Karol Bagh. It is also that same love with which a Calcuttan exiled in any part of the world wills himself to get out of his cosy kombol on a wintry morning in search of new books in some far-off suburb. That the love still remains is a sign that not all is lost in this age of reels, swipes and tweets, and that there is still something left in the feel of ochred pages and the bibliosmia of black print.

My train arrives at the station. It is time for me to return home. As I board my train, there is a smile on my lips, I can still hear the songs wafting from the loudspeakers on warm wintry morning far away…. Aaloker ei jharnadharay dhuiye dao…

27^th May, 2023