The Lies of a Voracious Reader

My mother often tells the story of how I’ve never known how to make friends. At eight or nine, or some age around eight or nine, she says, I used to walk around with books hidden in the bend of my elbow and read while sitting on hard, stone benches. In my mind, the white of my school uniform is whiter still, and my back is much like the lopsided curve of half a doughnut. In my mind, the book I’m reading is Famous Five or Secret Seven, or perhaps it is one of the Enid Blytons I’ve never read, or the Narnia books I promise I’ve read.

The reader in my mind is described by a word I’ve heard attached to other readers who read lots, all the time, when they’re not reading also. The reader in my mind is Voracious, and she has read the books that people on metros read without looking up, glaring at the book as if expecting the letters to crawl off the page if they don’t read closely enough.

The lies of my Voracious Reader self began at eleven when, after The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the other Narnia books refused to hold my attention. The seven other books in my box-set whined at me through pages that turned darker shades of streetlight yellow with every idle day. I pushed them to the back of a large cabinet that was somehow always filled with papers. On the day my father remembered that he had bought me some books on some Sunday, I told him, with the proud confidence of a liar, that I had read them all.

What followed next was three pages of Lord of the Rings. I found the book within the dark aisles of the Eloor Library close to home. In Eloor, I wandered through the shelves of books as quietly as I could, trying to droop my shoulders and soften my step. The names of the writers, impeccably arranged by alphabet, whizzed past my head quickly and I never remembered them. Once, in some pseudo display of courage, when I walked up to the front desk and asked for a book which remains nameless today, I was pointed towards the shelf I had been lurking around.

The librarian, with his bald head and collared white shirt, always seemed to be looking at me with narrowed eyes, with the wisdom of a Voracious Reader. I wondered, every time I uttered the name of a book, what he was thinking. When I picked Lord of the Rings, the thickness of the book made itself known to everyone at home: a family of non-readers, and I with my small hands and short fingers, set about reading the book with a great enthusiasm that lasted for three seconds.

[On a later day, when an aunt wandered into the room and scrutinized the Big Book at my desk, she raised her brows in the wow, I’m impressed look and I found that the late fee I was paying to the library was worth it]

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I spent two weeks of this December with Anjum Hassan’s Qayenaat, driven by a mad desire to live in a Bangalore I couldn’t find anywhere. In The Cosmopolitans are streets of Bangalore I have read about in other books and seen on others’ insta pages. My reading of the book was slow and comfortable — like when you wake up on a Sunday and stretch your feet, till only your toes leave the warmth of your blanket. I read in every corner of the house — on the couch, at the dining table, while lying on my stomach. When I finished, I did nothing and spoke to no one. The completion of the book was an event as unexciting as all events should be. It came and went without my realizing it, and I never worried about What Must Be Read Next.

Yet, the four other Bangalore books I bought remained on my shelf, and my December reading list stared back at me morosely. I thought back to the Voracious Reader of my childhood; the one with the lying problem.

[Reading, I imagine, must happen while sitting on rooftop cafes, or by large windows. The first pages of the book, with the title and the dedication, must be glossed over thoroughly, till the letters are examined and the design scrutinized. The first words of the book then, when they wear a voice in your head, must be read carefully, so that it can be decided later on, if they will feature in a tweet or a piece that might be written sooner or later. The first reading of the book must be long, it should last for at least twenty-one minutes without pause, so that the first break (however long it is) will remain only that — a break, before going back to the book, diving headfirst, because how else must one read?]

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What books have you read?
Some. Here and there. I don’t get the time.
But which is your favourite book?
Harry Potter, obviously. How can I pick any other book?
Ya dude, I swear.

Recently, when a friend asked me, with narrowed eyes, reprimand at the ready, whether I actually hate Twilight, I laughed and said, no, no, I’ve read it fifty times, how can I hate it?

Twilight was also read in the comfort of a Christmas vacation, the four books devoured furiously over ten days, over and over till my brain permanently resided in Forks, Arizona.

Some parts of the books stayed in my head with a stubborn persistence, as if the words were tattooed into my brain — so much so that I read while walking on the treadmill, in intervals of fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five minutes. My obsession was like any other obsession. It lasted till nothing, until it was taken over by other obsessions.

 [How must I admit to myself, plainly in these words, that I don’t know how to read like readers read and writers write, that I haven’t read all my life, that the books that should have been a part of my childhood have actually been sutured into my memories, borrowed from the childhood of girls that I am envious of]

Every Thursday morning this year has begun with two hours of nothingness, in which I get to sit on campus — grass all around me, book in hand, half-litre jar of coffee beside me. Three weeks ago, I finished Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends on a Thursday morning and for a while, I stared ahead. In my pink Books of 2018 journal, when I documented the completion of the book, my hands shook and my words seemed off. I wrote the date at the end of the page and began to think about the next book on my list.

But Sally Rooney stayed. I found the ennui I have found on the completion of other books, stories that have left me confused and happy, disoriented and sad. This inability to move on from her left me restless, and I wondered what the cost of this was— of not being able to read constantly, quickly, impatiently. I realized, with some delight, that moving on from a book has never been a problem, because I have never read like this, like there is nothing else I’d rather be doing.

[Now, in Nabokov’s Lolita, I have found in myself the capacity to be able to read slowly, to read each word like they’re small-small bites of a large cheesecake, topped with chocolate and chunks of caramel, so that when it’s done, there’s no joy in having finished it, but only in the consumption of it — with tongue and teeth: perversely, with languor — the same way in which Humbert Humbert looks at Lolita.]