What book could you read over and over again?
I have been through some books in my life; I have worked with them, around them and still am working. One of the things that I have experienced after going through a lot of reading is that there is a point beyond which I have forgotten a thing or two. I can no longer tell the exacts of things, be it a book or movie or a show. It has become more of remembering the feeling, the thought, the instinct or most prominently the imagination. Our brain, it cannot endlessly store everything to be accessed at any moment, at least mine can’t.
Thank God my parents thought that there needs to be a dedicated study room in the house or else I might have had to keep all the books I have in a store room, but then again, we don’t have a store room. I would say it’s a good trade off.
I have new books, a lot of them I received in the past 2 years due to the nature of my work. But the old ones are the ones I remember close to heart because they were the ones I read completely due to the sheer interest and enjoyment of reading, they were the steps I climbed to learn a lot about many aspects of life.
The book I could read again and again has fallen out of clarity in my mind, but I remember how I felt going through it. It was a children’s book, and I was a child when I had it. The book was dominated by scanned hand drawn beautifully water coloured pictures of birds and the blue green environment they live in the wild. The colours spread across the pages. The illustrations have hung on to my memory, they were so beautiful, and they carried the entire feeling of the book.
Sadly, nothing else I can remember about it, what was written, what was the book’s name, who wrote it or who drew the illustrations. Just the beautiful colours and illustrations spread across the memory. More than reading again and again I think it’s a book I would love to turn the pages of again and again to enjoy the feeling it once carried for a mind that carried less of the world back then.
It may be surprising that it’s that simple of a choice in a world decorated with so many books with a variety of depth, but this is what I want to return to.
I lost track of the book as I grew and it is surprising how the significance of certain things emerge after a level of maturity has settled in. I suspect my maternal grandfather might have probably gifted it to someone thinking I had outgrown it.
If I were to come by this book again somehow, I would go back to the place where I opened its cover for the first time, allow the sunlight to touch its pages and let the colours spread into my eyes and mind. I know for sure it might just inspire me to write the most wonderful of the things I would write in my life.
Written by Anuran Chatterji
Early Morning Memories 