We were a family of five children, parents, many guests and numerous books. Books embellished all rooms, corridors and every corner of our home. At times I feel  I have lived many years of my conscious life in a library .My father was a lawyer;  so he had a large  collection of books on law; this was a professional requirement. But his intellectual proclivities drove him to an endless band width of books on social sciences. What was considered a vulgar intrusion was fiction. The situation at home was very similar to a parental lock that one puts on internet to prevent accessing some sites.  Fiction was this site. So there we were; living in a house full of books but no interaction with the world outside was permitted through fiction.

I remember protesting and reading some JH Chase and Mill’s and Boon and my father saying,

Understand what romance means…don’t waste time on silly tales of romance. Reading is hard work. Read well

Ha-ha …what sense would this wisdom make to a twelve year old who was dying to understand why some girls got more attention from boys and some less?

Over years of handling books we all  had developed an expertise in positioning books in their place into a fine intuitive art. The study had law books; the living room would house an eclectic collection and in my father’s bedroom his favorite authors  Russell, Sorokin. Nietzsche, Gandhi, Nehru… He would always fall asleep reading and someone would tip toe to pull the weight of the book off his chest… this weight could be lifted; one wonders at times  how much he carried within his heart. In our little earmarked zones at home we had to create a little space for the books too. This dispersed landscape  of books meant my father could be anywhere like Florence Nightingale with a book in his hand looking for another one.

All these books undertook a long journey of life with all of us. We moved residence many times in our close to sixty years of stay in Delhi. Whenever we moved; we all knew that books needed an earmarked place in our new abode; so the large book cases and open shelves would find a worthy place at our new home right away.   

My father is no more  but his books stand tall and proud in his study. The underlined pages of the books reveal the seriousness with which these pages have been  read, the leather jacketed ones were considered precious, there are  some books which stand tall but untouched ; revealing a promise  that  he must have made to himself that he would read them  at some point in time.

Well, the books stand tall and proud and rooted but all of us have moved far, wide and away. At times when  I stand close to the books in his study, I can sense them whispering…

there was an old man in this house who loved us to death…does he not live here anymore?”

I feel like whispering back …”we too love you …but in all honesty a little lesser than your old friend”.