Would You Like Some Bread With That Book?: And Other Instances of Literary Love

By Veena Venugopal

If you really think about it, there are only two kinds of people: those who spend the week before a trek to the Everest base camp training and eating right, and those who lie in bed agonizing over which book should make it into their backpack. Would You Like Some Bread With That Book? is about this second group of people. Join the author in bookstore aisles as she fantasizes about falling in love with men who share her love of books or is spat upon by a book-crazed gentleman who is compelled to sell his library. A collection of 14 evocative and laugh-out-loud funny essays about books and reading, this book speaks to anyone for whom books are not merely words on a page, but sites of adventure, conversation and reverie.
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• Language: English
• Publisher: YODA PRESS
• Release date: May 2, 2012
• ISBN: 938257929X

Book preview

Note

1

Coming Home

Every reader, I am certain, has a book that is the barometer of their lives, a keeper of records, an unintended memoirist. Recently, I recognized mine.

I grew up in a township on the sleepy side of Cochin, a cluster of thousand or so houses built to a homogenous Nehruvian theme and a bifurcated class system—managers and workers. It was, on paper, an idyllic existence. Our fathers went to work in the company uniform, we attended the company school, played at the company club, shopped at the company market. Everybody knew everyone else and attended birth ceremonies, weddings and funerals as if they were their own. If someone had told me when I was five that the township was the whole world, I would have believed them unquestioningly.

There were children aplenty and my brother and I lived an active life—school, tuitions and games. Only in the two long months of summer did our lives dull. The humidity and the heat made the air an impenetrable force. We spent the first two weeks of the holiday doing everything we had planned—climbing the mango trees, fishing in a polluted bund, cycling everywhere. But a fortnight in, we would be exhausted. And the next six weeks stretched long before us. This was the time before summer camps and coaching classes. There was no television, much less a gameboy or the internet. The only thing to do was read.

I had long tossed the Noddys of my early school days, grown past Enid Blyton’s wishing trees and famous fives and was beginning to tire of Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys that summer. My father, who much to my mother’s annoyance, bought too many books with his limited salary, was home one Sunday and I asked him if I could read something from his bookshelves. He must have had about 300 books or so, spilling out of two shelves that lined our living room. Essentials of Materials Management standing cover-to-cover with Humboldt’s Gift. Most Indian fathers of that generation live a life of constantly evaluating ‘appropriateness’ for their daughters; strangely this gene was missing in mine. He looked up, I remember, and absently pulled out the first book he reached and gave it to me. It was called To Kill a Mockingbird; I was 10 years old.

I read it; it took me all of summer that first year and I understood very little. I thought I was Scout and my brother Jem and we had a shared friend, who my mind cast in the role of Dill. I picked a neighbour, who had a ‘strange’ habit of keeping his windows shut, and made him our Boo that summer. I wonder how I persisted with the book. It was complex, both in its vocabulary and the historical setting of southern USA. I mean, right in the second or third page, Lee writes, ‘All we had was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his stinginess. In England, Simon was irritated by the persecution of those who called themselves Methodists at the hands of their more liberal brethren, and as Simon called himself a Methodist, he worked his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence to Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens.’ None of this is supposed to make sense to a 10-year-old in a township near Cochin. But I suppose I took what I got from the book. I understood the kids and that, I thought, was the book.

The next summer, I took it out of the bookshelf and read it again. I understood it a little better. Not the race difference. Or Atticus Finch’s courtroom speech. Or what rape was. But I understood them enough to know that there was a subtext I was too young for. And so it became a self-appointed ritual, the reading of To Kill a Mockingbird at the beginning of the summer holidays. It was my marker of time. Everything remained the same every year—the heavy, humid air, the sour smell of unripe mangoes in our garden, the incessant chatter of the particularly voluble Kerala sparrows, the cane chair on our verandah that was my reading spot. Only the canvas of the story expanded. And I learned a little more every year—about places beyond the township, about people, about the difficulty of doing the right thing, about Scout, Jem, Atticus, Boo and most of all, myself.

By the time I was 14, I sort of knew the book by heart. Yet the words made more sense every time I read them. I was shocked by the fact that my father had allowed me to read this book when I was so young. This fact, strangely, gave me a sense of self-confidence. That if he knew I would be able to handle these very adult concepts while so young, then I should perhaps believe it too.

When I finished school, my father worked out the arithmetic that a public-sector salary did not add up to college and hostel bills of two children. So, while I went to Chennai to college, my father—in his words—‘sold his soul’, and joined the recently liberalized Indian corporate boom by taking up a job in Ahmedabad. I visited our new home during my holidays and now the bookshelves were in a room my parents had taken to calling the ‘library’. To Kill a Mockingbird, like old India, was accidentally relegated to the back of the shelf and I graduated to reading other authors, moving continent by continent— Andre Brink, Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer one year; to Marquez, Llosa and Jorge Amado the next.

Life, as they say, happened and I moved on to an MBA, a career, a marriage and motherhood. My parents kept moving— Pune, Mangalore and then five years ago, abruptly, to Muscat. They packed up their stuff, shifted it to an apartment they owned in Trichur and moved abroad. Cochin became Kochi and I forgot all about my life there. If I ever thought about it, it was only to ruminate over a stupidity or bemoan the shortcomings of a smalltown upbringing.

Last year, in a trip that was 17 years coming, I went back to Kerala. Very little looked different to me. My parents visited too and we stayed for a couple of nights in that apartment, their transit house. I poked about the things a little. The bookshelves were empty, the books were in cartons, yet to be unpacked. I dipped through some, just flipping through those familiar pages from my childhood. We were running around attending weddings and visiting relatives, so there really was no time to sit and read. But I wanted to look at the books, just touch them and smell them. It was like meeting old friends. Old friends with whom you don’t have the burden of making a conversation. And there it was; tucked under Alex Haley’s Roots lay my father’s copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.

I pulled it out and opened it. The pages were dark amber, the paper powdery. ‘When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.’ It was a line so familiar, I was shocked I had gone so long without it. And just like that I was back in that verandah; I could smell the summer and feel the cane chair under me. I sensed the lightness of my 10-year-old self, my daydreams, faint fantasies and misguided optimism. The years fell away noiselessly.

‘Why you have tears, mama?’ my daughter asked in her Dilli English.

And there in a room with ghost furniture tucked under dustsheets, suitcases strewn on the floor, passport jackets, shoe bags, toilet kits and a thousand other markers of transience, I heard myself say, ‘Because I am finally home.’

2

Losing My Character

I still remember its exact location in my school library. It was the sixth bookshelf on the right hand side, the second ledge from the top. It was wedged in the middle flanked by two rows of books. My friend, who I will call X because she is still alive, on my Facebook list of friends and is likely to kill me if I reveal her name, was the first to read it. She returned it to the library at the end of the mandatory week and then came to me and whispered its location. It had ‘something interesting on pages 121 and 165’. I walked in with the swagger of the conspicuously casual, browsed shelves four and five, before moving to six pretending to read the back covers of about 10 books. Then in one quick motion, I looked left and right, cast a careful glance behind me at Mrs Thangamma the librarian, and pushed my hands to the middle of the shelf and found the book waiting for me.

That day couldn’t have passed by any slower. I went home, feigned illness to skip my table tennis practice and sat at my study desk and opened the book straight on page 121. Karen was at the stable. It was a hot day. The haystack looked inviting. She didn’t want to ruin her shirt, so she took it off before she clambered to the top and lay on the cool straw. She probably dozed off. So when she saw Jason—the new stableman’s head in front of her, she thought it was a dream. Two paragraphs later when he thrust into her, she knew for sure, it wasn’t a dream. But thrust what, I wondered. X and I discussed several possibilities the next day. We re-read the pages during lunch break and the two short intervals between classes. We walked far into the rubber garden which was our playground to think through our non-existent visits to stables and take inventory of thrust-able items.

This was before the internet and cable television. I don’t know how it was for kids living in big cities, but for us small-town teenagers, finding out about sex was a ridiculously frustrating process. For one, there was absolutely no ‘birds and bees’ talk. Parents, I suppose, assumed the school would take care of this uncomfortable business. At school, the biology teacher ran through the chapter on the reproductive system in about 15 minutes. By the time I had un-steeled myself from the embarrassment of her talking about the ‘menstrual cycle’ in front of the boys in class, she was also done with what happens after. We