The Good Reader

(Published in First City magazine, June 2013).

There was a time when the easiest way to spot me in a Dilli crowd, was by the size of my bag. The jibes I heard about it from my friends (“large enough to pitch a tent for two”), dug deeper than the bag-strap did into my shoulder. I sulked, I carried on, I had no choice, because amongst other Just in Case I Need It rubble inside my bag, was the essential heavyweight: my little private survival kit, my bean bag to lean on, my teleporter, my big fat book (sometimes two; three on mood-swing PMS days). You see, I lived in two godforsaken corners of the city all my life – getting to any place cool and reasonably exciting took at least an hour of travel, and I survived that large time-swathe called pre-Metro era of Dilli travel by falling facedown into a good book. It was the perfect way to escape the weather, the stares, the eveteasing, the filth, the shabbiness, the waiting, the waiting along the way. It made the bumpy rickshaw ride, the sidling-up-type uncle in the DTC bus, the cruel slap of Dilli ki loo from the window, the overcharging autowallah seem like mere mosquitoes to briefly look up at while I lived elsewhere in time. 

Back then I read a lot, and not necessarily the greats, not the prescribed reading lists. Choosing my reads was a space of utter freedom from ‘should’-s in life; sort of like the impossible dream of a party where you choose invitees and time their entrances and exits, the chatter and the pauses, to a perfect musical tempo. It was a party and I didn’t want it to end. There were exciting, intimate conversations with perfect strangers. There was amusement of watching two guests argue and contradict each other completely. There was the utter joy of kicking a stupid guest out of the door on a whim - all I needed to do was shut a book midway somewhere in my waking life. It was all very wack yes, as insane as Matrix-meets-Inception. As a journalist and book reviewer, the parties just got madder and madder. I could rave and bitch about my guests, I could have deep and insightful conversations with their makers even. Whatever time wasn’t spent reading, was lived in the afterglow of a good book, or the hangover of a bad one.

Fiction was my great escape, especially when I had to shut the book and face life. With the fiction-reader’s tools on full charge, life’s drudgeries could be but the ‘situations’ in a book that I was watching rather than reading. A dire situation doesn’t seem so dire if you make it a chapter in a book that by rule must end in some sort of significant denouement. Turn that exasperating, finger-on-your-panic-button person into fictional character, and you’ve got your breath back. He’s now an object of dissection, subject to the fiction-reader’s tool set: context analysis, psychological origins, personal history, benefit of doubt. I felt airy, once-removed from myself, I kept even my enemies close; I could have any number of conversations with that exasperating person without letting him get under my skin. I could nurse that little smirk and walk away with the perverse pleasure of knowing that he, my ‘character’, had no idea of what I’d done to him; it was sweet, sweet cruelty that didn’t hurt anybody in realtime, and as a consequence, was guiltless.

And then one fine day last year, I stopped reading books.

It wasn’t as if the world ran dry of good books to read. It was more like, the world was too painful a place to return to every time there was a tear in my fictional universe. I was always living inside words, inside my head, always obsessively translating, translating. I could see people’s emotions type themselves into text as they talked. The anticipation of this had its toll eventually; reading had begun to terrify me.

So I shut my book, and looked up. For a while I didn’t know what to do, how to cope. My only skill set - the fiction-reader’s tools - became redundant when I applied it to myself. I tried tying the ends; I imposed genres; I failed. I wanted to be Romance; all I got was Absurd. I tried High Melodrama; alas, it turned rather Neo-Realism. I wanted to be fiction; I was repeatedly, life in all its weirdness. 

And then like a character straight out of fiction (a melancholic alcoholic, most of the time), I got up and I walked out into the city, into the blinding sun. And strangely, I now felt readerly epiphany, reverberating like a tolling bell: there were sights, there were moments, there were beautiful stories in perfect balance that had me staring eyes wide, ears cottonwoolly, the back of my throat aching with strange, crazy desire. I had shut my books, but I was still reading, this time myself, in a nebulous book-in-the-making called Dilli, full of false starts and sudden, joyful discoveries. Here I realised that pathetic fallacy isn’t just a trope; the world makes so much sense when we feel our emotions and our selves extend into the weather, into the very texture that our living spaces are made of.  I realised that cities are like good literature: they don’t talk, we merely overhear them. I realised that even in life, the real talking is silent, between dialogues and words; as long as I know when to close the quotes and hear them open, there is richness in conversation. I realised that the city of Dilli gives me exactly that which I enjoy in a book: anonymity in a crowd of known people. Perhaps some day I would also be gifted that rare sliver of perfect God-like detachment: when in the middle of a completely fictional universe, the reader gets a glimpse of the writer at his desk, penning in wet ink, the very words that she is reading.

And so, I began writing non-fiction, this column - this strange chronicled consequence of an experiment in fiction gone very wonky. I’m dying to hurtle towards the end just so I can own this story, but I’m also terrified that there never will be another as enticing-beautiful, so I slow myself down and savour every lush moment. Meanwhile, I ignore all thoughts of being read like a story, a character, by a reader like you.

A friend who could live on reading if the world ever ran out of food, stoked that thought with a question lately.

‘Would you dare to read the book till the end, if you realise it’s about you?’

Without hesitation, the Reader and Writer in me typed in unison, ‘No. I’d shut the book as soon as I found out.’  

WHAT KEEPS THE DILLIWALI SANE

When words have wrung her brain dry, the Dilliwali resorts to playing picture-picture. Her latest addiction is illustration, by a certain artist otherwise known as co-founder of the world-famous-in-India brand Chumbak (she parted ways two years ago and is now a freelancer). Alicia Souza is every bit the Dilliwali’s nemesis: she’s a happy Bangalorewali, is mad about her dogs, understands words by blowing them into images, lives by chocolate and coffee. But both women are essentially doing the same thing: collecting life-vignettes like little pebbles and shells, colouring them anecdotal, sharing with whoever cares, and chuckling at it all. A daily gift of Alicia’s adorable doodles will make your Facebook wall a much nicer place. She’ll tell you all about Old Wives’ tales, the perils of doing Surya Namaskar in the company of two puzzled canine pets, the things you can’t do with a face pack on, and how the snooze button is a woman’s best friend. Even better: she’ll show you all of that until you’re sniggering loud enough to make the colleagues jealous.

Get hooked to our lady of the giggles at www.facebook.com/the.aliciasouza

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com)