Of books and all kinds of buyers

YOU cannot buy happiness, but you can buy books. And it is, more or less, the same thing.’ I read this aphorism written on a placard at an exotic bookshop and nodded in agreement. Books enrich our lives. And they do so even if we do not read all that are in our possession. I, too, have a disposition to buy more books than I can ever read in this lifetime. The Japanese word tsundoku describes this phenomenon of acquiring reading material and letting it pile up in one’s home without reading it. The Japanese believe that surrounding oneself with unread books enriches our lives as they remind us of all we don’t know. I shall finish at least James Joyce’s Ulysses and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged before I die, I promise myself every third day.

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During our travels, my wife has lost me many times during city tours, to be retrieved later from some forlorn corner of a bookstore. Being in New Delhi at the time of the World Book Fair a few months ago was an opportune moment for me. I could blissfully browse through books for hours together without fear of a forced retrieval. Strolling leisurely through exquisitely decorated bookstalls, I observed and overheard a stunning variety of book buyers.

A woman, clad in an olive-green sari, said to her husband at a stall for Russian books, ‘Just look at those volumes in ashen-grey bindings. They will go perfectly well with the curtains and wallpaper in our drawing room. What do you think?’

At another stall, I overheard a bespectacled, middle-aged woman asking the salesman, ‘You don’t have a single novel (sic) by William Shakespeare. What a pity! He is the only English author I cherish!’

The real bombshell came from my wife’s friend accompanying us. She picked up a paperback and said to me, ‘Oh, it is by Mrs Dalloway. She writes wonderfully lucid prose. Have you read her?’ I stared at her face, then at the title of the book for a moment, and said with a wry smile, ‘Virginia Woolf? It is probably a recent novel by Mrs Dalloway — something about hunting and forests.’ She insisted on buying a book of my choice. Keeping in view her literary tastes, I cheekily suggested Boris Pasternak by

Doctor Zhivago (and not the other way round).

I remembered an incident from my visit to the World Book Fair back in 1984. When I was leaving the fair premises, I noticed a neighbour of mine, a karyana shop owner, holding a newly bought book. Reading the surprise on my face, he smiled. ‘You are right, sir,’ he said. ‘I have never read anything beyond my ledger and account books. But every year, I do buy a book on the horoscope predictions for the year.’ I cast a sideways glance at the title of the book. It was George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four.