They say the path way of heaven is paved with all the lost items of the world. And I think I just got lucky as I had access to it……. I found my long lost book today from this pathway in heaven………..
I meet Ellen at the apartment that she has made her home for a few months that she is in India for. Many have made this place their abode when they have come to Bangalore. I have spent many evenings here with a few good friends. We talk about books and then Ellen asks me who is my favourite Indian author… and like always … I have a story to tell….. I promptly tell her… “it has to be Pankaj Mishra….. for his book The Romantics” its one of the books that makes me love my life and when you read through this book… you realise that there are people like yourself… .aimless….. just living every moment to the fullest…. For whom life, success and achievements have far wider meaning then money, power & position. who spend their life not looking for anything.. nothing.. just living every moment.. reading… sitting…. Hanging around and passing by this world……. Just take in what you see.. what you experience….and understand that you and only you can be your best friend….
I tell Ellen.. The Romantics was one of my most prised possessions…. Jill had borrowed it from me and then it changed a few hands… girls from the hostel had read it and passed it around… .. it got lost somewhere between all this……. Then I see a stack of books…. I look through it… sad eyes…. With no hope in my heart to find The Romantics back… yet hoping against hope to see it there. And what……. It’s there…. My copy… I recognize it… it’s a little worn out…. The cover feels a little sticky…. But then this is The Romantics… my very own copy….. I love this book… if I had a bible… it would be this one. My face glows and my eyes twinkle….. I have opened it and read pages randomly form here and there… there is no way I can pick one favourite part of this book… it’s the whole of it that makes it enchanting… it feels like I am under its spell.
From the book:
“Her presence in Benares, in a tiny room on the roof, where she appeared to do nothing all day except read and listen to western classical music, was a mystery to me. I thought it had to do with some great sadness in her past. It was a large judgement to make on someone I dint know at all.”
“But it was a situation that seemed to have its own odd logic and momentum. I felt I had already surrendered to it. I was no longer in control. My nervousness had been replaced by a quiet excitement.”
“Even if I could describe it without being meretricious, I would still be false to my memory of the event, which matched at only a very crude level……”
“I asked her what she was doing in Benares. ‘passing through’, she had said, and the words had stayed with me. they had suggested a kind of perpetual journeying through the world, a savouring of life in a way I had no means of knowing, the life itself seeming – as it did in the pictures in Miss West’s room – unimaginably adventurous.”
“I tell myself ‘detachment is the key’ and then even a few more minutes of unbroken attention means so much to me! It has been such a joy first to see our proximity grow and then open an entire now fields of understanding, of affections and of ourselves as we are.”
At first I was merely pleased that the book had found you after years of separation, but when I learned how much it meant to you, I was overjoyed at your reunion.
ReplyDeleteHere's my favorite blurb:
"I had once envied her for her great luck, for living life, as I saw it, in ever-new glamorous settings. But what I had seen as luck had come with its own special burden, its own store of disappointments and frustrations, and now that burden, which Miss West was to carry for the rest of her life, made the luck seem tainted" (241).
“There are certain books we read which no matter how celebrated or acclaimed make little or no impression on us. It is because, intellectually and emotionally we aren’t ready for them; our experience and understanding of ourselves and the world isn’t rich and deep enough to match that of the writer.”
ReplyDeleteThe above is just one among the ,many favorite lines from the book.
I always wanted to be ordinary and anything that would make me stand out made me uncomfortable. One is never appreciated for being so in ambitious.. and yet I knew that this was just the most beautiful way to live and enjoy life. I think I came across this book at just the right stage. It encouraged me to continue living my life in the most ordinary fashion.