Books are...!!
Sorry King Frederick, I do not agree with you on this one. The fact is that you did not have as many books back in 18th century as you would have now. But dogs, you probably had a number. So I quite understand why you said that (reportedly). Raise your concern NOW if you didn't.
Well, books. Any book-lover in the world would corroborate me saying that they are the best companions for us, regardless of the times and moods and other factors. They have a world inside them that they offer us to come to and explore. The best refuge in the world. My uncle had a small library at my Grandma's place - a small, low ceiling loft-like room having two large windows (well, large for its size) and a tungsten filament bulb. The library had about 1500 books, but no furniture except for a wooden stool with a light-green, textured, woven upholstery. There were no book-cases, the room just had a couple of shelves built in the wall itself. And because the room was small and hence the walls/shelves couldn't be bigger, the books were arranged like a row of them in the back and another row in the front of the shelves. Sometimes they were simply stacked. There were some cartons lying in the corner, probably with some magazines in them, but I never checked :)
After my uncle moved out, leaving the library like a treasure for us kids, we used to spend good part of our day there, whenever we visited our grandmother. Because she lived alone, the library wasn't opened and cleaned daily. So the room always had a little hot, heavy air with a familiar smell of old, worn-out books. There was no fan, but still no matter how hot it was (and it gets pretty hot in afternoons in Delhi), I enjoyed being in there, sweating and feeling hot till I got light-headed. My mom and grandmother used to shout and call me downstairs, probably wondering what on earth is keeping me busy in that infernal room. There was a Victorian-style electric switch, the kind of round, black one, made of Bakelite I assume, that we commonly had in every household.
The pale-yellow light in that small room with a little hot, heavy air and smell of old books - this all was a perfect combination for my world, my cozy space where I could stay cocooned for all my life. I did not bother about anything happening outside that world of mine for as long as I was there. There was absolute peace and calm. I used to pick some old paperback, with a newspaper cover on it, pages gone yellow and brittle, open it and smell the pages...and it was transcendental. It still is. Even to this day I tend to stand in front of my bookcase, take out some old paperback that once sat in my uncle's library and smell its pages. Just one such sniff and I become that little kid cocooned in his own space in that small loft-library with a yellow-light bulb.
Visuals, audios and smells are the best agents that bring back memories, and I believe that smell is the strongest of them all. It brings the memories back in their entirety - strongly and vividly.
Sadly, the library collapsed for absence of care. The books could not survive too much dust and heat and lack of care. And my grandmother wasn't able to take care of it anymore, she wasn't getting any stronger with time. A time came when the whole library got infested with termites. They were everywhere, in every book, and left very little to be rescued. My grandmother had someone dump all the termite-eaten books in big sack and put that to fire. I had brought home some books with me before the termite problem, so they were spared. But what a great collection my uncles had - history, fiction, non-fiction, classics, science, mathematics, religion, astrology, astronomy, fairy tales, plays, regional languages, poetry, satirical cartoon collections, multi-lingual dictionary and more. It was there where I picked up my first Hindi novels from. I read some great works by eminent authors while I was still a student - like Sharat Chandra, Bankim Chandra, Vimal Mitr, Mohan Rakesh, Rajendra Yadav, Manu Bhandari, Amrita Pritam, Shivani, Premchand.
My own library now, a small cupboard-style bookcase, has 2 or 3 shelves dedicated to the books from my uncle's library. It has plays by Anton Chekhov, physics and astronomy books by Mir Publishers, a Russian History book, a book on unified theory of everything (note that these books are more than 60 years old), a book on Neutrons, a couple of books based on calculus, physics and mathematics among many other spanning genres like poetry, novels, satires etc. Its a treasure I wish to possess and protect all my life. And expand the existing realm :)
The current count as of today stands at around 215 books. May sound a good number but it doesn't feel like it standing in front of the bookcase, which is already overflowing by the way. I don't want to invest in another bookcase, I now want a full-fledged library shelves mounted on wall. I have a very specific, very basic design in mind, see below -
This design is technically better for the books too. Instead of keeping them in standing position, they are now lying at rest at an angle. This should add to their life I suppose. But this project has to wait till we move to another house or build another room in the existing one just for this. But one day...for sure...
