It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I spend most of my leisure days reading novels without a break, like my life depended on it. The novels I read vary from classics to romantic thrillers. What keeps me going without food, TV or human contact for days on end, just engrossed in the books piled on my bed, is the story itself and the knowledge that it is in a whole other world.
Fiction is less affecting than reality. Reality sucks, you know it. The mind numbing escape from reality through fiction, knowing it can never touch me in real life. The key to affording huge stacks of novels is either a membership in a lending library or buying secondhand books. I have immense respect for books, no matter how old or new. I believe that dog-ears in a book shows irresponsibility. I cannot tolerate scribbling either. In fact, the books I own, be it secondhand books or new edition hardcovers, I never write my name or doodle in it. No writing equipment or bookmarks shall go near them. Which is why, I was surprised by my reaction to a book I had borrowed from a lending library in town.
I came upon a novel that was fairly old but neatly bound in a transparent cover. The expected yellow and blue stains decorated the pages but what took me by surprise were the doodles on the first few pages of the book. The drawings were fairly small but vividly clear. There were sketches of a hat, a pair of attractive eyes, steaming coffee in a cup and saucer, luscious lips, a shirt, a face of a horse, and so on. Though it was pencil doodle it was clear how talented the previous reader must have been. Each page had a face that resembled the characters described in the story. I was excited enough to turn over all the pages of the book till the last one looking for more enticing drawings. It sounds silly but the drawings were strangely appealing and arresting. The faces were attractive, each feature clearly defined, and mind you, the doodles were hardly 1 or 2 centimeters long. How talented and accurate should a person be that he or she clearly understood, pictured, and captured the described characters in the drawing? It gives an odd sort of excitement and pleasure to know that the author herself couldn’t have pictured the characters she created that astutely. The rough sketches may have been impersonal but it seemed like a message conveyed by the artist to the future readers of the book.
It reminded me of the school books that were handed down to juniors by seniors every year with certain puzzles or entertaining messages handwritten in them by the previous owner as a form of communication to the new owner. I also found a bookmark in a secondhand book that I had bought to read on a train journey. It was an unexpected and small but pleasant surprise. The bookmark contained a picture of the Virgin Mary with a short prayer that sounded like it was written specifically for the sailors at sea. These small, pleasant and unexpected surprises are like gifts on a Christmas day from an unknown to an unknown who have only the book in common. These are strange ways of bonding, a bonding nonetheless.
