Ba..ba..lu..ba..la……books!!!

There are some things you never forget, ever. Cycling, you can get back to this whenever and wherever, swimming, dancing to a rhythm, dusting (this one only applies to cleanliness OCD freaks)….because these so called acquired skills take refuge in your instinct cabinet, refusing to ever move. They stay put and how! 

Well, coming to books, that’s what a good story also does to me, somehow takes up permanent residence in my basic vitals. I can always recollect the time, place and smells of where and how I had the story reach into me. I can always vividly recreate the setting and the light, like I have the entire set along with the emotions encapsulated and frozen in a time bubble, for forever. My very first show in the theatre, the Jungle Book and the coconut falling on Baloo’s head as he dances and prances about to and with the ‘bare necessities’ is an immortal memory of my sepia childhood. The kathakali dance in the temple of Kerala as watched from Rahel’s eyes, from the comfort seat on my bed. I remember the reddened eyes that narrated the story of the dancer within the story of Rahel, which seemed like a story of my dance, and me. I owned them all. My bed in my room at Sabarigiri was much more than a dreamy place, it also doubled up as my own little far-removed world, all of it within a mosquito net. It was also a time machine that would take me places both outside and inside of me…every day whenever I held a book in my palms and was drowned in it, oblivious to the motion of the motor carrying me across time zones and landscapes. The Sirius incident happened, not in the darkened corridors of the ministry of magic, but in the turbulently moistened eyes of Harry Potter, the vulnerable soul sitting in her room upstairs with her younger brother listening to Mirza Ghalib on his headphones to get past the grief of the potent loss. Even the densely dark night of that day, I remember. It seemed like the stars too were in mourning. And then Calvin and Hobbes dived on each other in the middle of my living room and undid all the furniture settings and all else, as I laughed with my insides churning and whirling at their genius of seeing the world and its people exactly as is and realizing how humourous it all is, all the brazen realities of life. The laughter and its echoes reverberated in my house and soul, plunging all coordinates in a humorous nausea, slipping everything from its coordinates and thereby altering all familiarities. The boat trip of Kabir and Lata along the banks of the Ganga on an early, bland kind of a morning...and my passionate appeal to Lata as I stalked the couple in the shadows of the banks, 'marry him Lata..he loves you. please, marry him'. My loud, pounding heart even drowned some of the written words and dramatised it into an alternate of the fictional reality. She didnt marry him and my heart was broken.

The books, they take a lot out of you, sometimes a trifle more than they give you…but the connections made, they stay afloat...they linger on.