Urban Bawl 6: Sniffing Books

An edited version of this piece is the sixth in the series of my Urban Bawl columns in Time Out Mumbai for their 'Back of the Book' page.

This is published in the March 30-April 12 2012  (Vol 8 Issue 16) issue of Time Out Mumbai.

Sniffing Books

The news that the final curtain was brought down on the print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica brought back memories of how central its weighty, leather-spined volumes were to libraries. My school library had a set, as did my college, the colleges I taught in and teach in now. The grand old public libraries of the city- the British Council and the American Centre had a set too; the American had Encyclopaedia Americana to boot.  Just as the Britannica was central to these libraries; these libraries were central to our city. Their recent passing into avatars that have left them but a shadow of their former selves has been a matter of great regret. What is a library if you cannot go there; books, if you cannot touch them and there are no pages left to sniff?

You need a library (or two) to bookend your life. You need the comfort of interminable shelving to know that all is right with this world. You need to smell the pages- tangy new ones and musty yellowed ones, the odour of familiarity wafting around while you immersed yourself. Even those corners of the libraries, where it seemed no one ventured (like the dusty shelves with the encyclopaedias), held a special place in your heart. 

All through the eighties and much of the nineties, the BCL and the American were my special vice. I was addicted enough to make weekly visits to these dens of intellectual stimulation. Having a sturdy jhola was as important to my existence then as a smartphone is today. I would walk from VT to the American Centre,  pick up four books; walk to the British Council (eat the best pav-bhaji in town just outside Maker Chambers), issue another four books and lug all eight all the way back to VT- the jhola strap slicing into my shoulder could not erase the smile on my face.

In those cycles of eight, I was to befriend Kurt Vonnegut Jr., John Irving, James Michener, Allen Drury, Arthur C. Clarke, Harlan Ellison, Tom Wolfe, Art Buchwald, Carl Sagan... where do I stop? It occurs to me that you can discover new authors only in libraries, through chance encounter and serendipity. The lack of lasting liabilities makes for easy friendships. In a bookshop one is much more deliberate and guarded; your wallet governs the spreading of affection to such books and authors that you have not been formally introduced to. Even the smaller lending libraries in the city- Abbas at King's Circle being the most loved, allowed you the illicit pleasure of spending time with those most addictive and prolific of writers- Stephen King, Tom Clancy or Lawrence Sanders. You see, a P G Wodehouse was for buying. Tom Clancy on the other hand was for a good read and return.

We are the sum total of all we read, or have read in our growing years. The passing of libraries have left us bereft and anchorless. They have, and that is some consolation, been replaced by some monster bookstores (like the one in 'You've Got Mail') - Landmark and Crossword. But, ask yourself this: are you more likely to read a book through if you borrowed it from a library or if you bought the book outright? 

My First Serial Killer

I saw Claude Chabrol's Le Boucher (The Butcher, 1970), I'm not sure, but probably around 1974. I was nine.

I watched this film in blurry black and white on Bombay Doordarshan. This was a time of fledgling programming by Bombay's only television channel, leading to its golden age in the mid-seventies. Foreign films were a weekly staple, as I remember, under the program head of 'Montage'. For me though, looking back now, Chabrol's film was one of many firsts: it was my first introduction to world cinema, it was my first sub-titled film (something I unquestioningly accepted as normal) and it was my first serial killer movie.

Of course, what stood out for me was the last bit. As kids we were all brought up on a bloody diet of killing, murder, bloodshed, what have you... you know the wholesomeness of growing up, none of the namby-pamby stuff.

One scene in the movie stood out, clearly imprinting in my memory. I have recalled it many times since, I must have been pleasantly traumatized by it. A schoolteacher takes a bunch of children out on a picnic to a cave site in the hills. They sit by a stone ledge and open their sandwiches. One little girl open her buttered sandwich and exclaims 'Its raining!' The teacher says 'It's not raining.' The girl cries out 'But its red!' and looks up. A bloody female hand with freshly dripping blood pokes over the ledge. Everyone screams. Oh, how we loved watching this then, a bunch of kids in our neighbor's home (the only television set in the area at that time) and replayed it over and over in our heads and in our games. Drops of blood being an index for murder is a corny cliche today, but for us kids it was an affirmation of our own imaginations and fears.

By this time of course I had had my fill of horror stories and horror movies (only through books and magazines, trawling the depths of Poona's British Council Library, where I practically grew up). A particular favorite was the Encyclopedia of Horror Film and Cinefantastique (full of pictures, both scary and naughty-that's where I discovered King Kong, Godzilla, Dracula, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, The House of Wax, the Thing, the Blob, and everything undead), and of course the monthly Films and Filming magazine that I could never get enough of. Watching these actual movies would come much, much later. No, I consumed texts, still images and above all movie posters, lurid marquees in books and magazines and outside on all the cinema theaters I passed everyday in our school-bus on our way to school, fueling fantasies and populating the visual libraries in my head.

Chabrol, of course, I saw for the first and only time time that evening in the mid 70s. I found the scene again today, after nearly 40 years, and in glorious color here. And yes, the scene played put pretty much as I remembered it. Amazing, how I must have internalised the whole thing. A few years later, still a kid, I wrote a murrrderrr ishtory of my own called 'Whatever happened to Aunt Alice?' full of killing and assorted bunkum, where the first clue to a possible doing-in were three drops of blood on a bedsheet. Yes, yes, I did Google the title today to find that it was a film made in 1969, and I must have seen the title somewhere, what did I know? Plagiarism does not exist when you are ten. I must have seen the poster on the right, it has a gory familiarity, the blood is just about right. Also, this just occurred to me: the image of the bloody hand on the DVD box mirrors the hand in Le Boucher. Some amazing triangulation happening here, both inside my head and outside of it.

But of this I am sure of:
when those drops fell on the little girl's open buttered sandwich, I saw them fall in red.