Letting Go With Love
Books with funny origins
There are some books in our personal libraries that have come to us in unusual ways. And when life demands a cleansing, a “de-cluttering”, I always struggle to part with books. Today, before I consign one particular book to the dreaded “give away” pile, I want to write about how I think it might have come into my possession.
The book is the fifth installment in a series of fourteen and you may be asking, where are its companions? Fair question. The book is “Fires of Heaven” by Robert Jordan, part of the famous fantasy series, “The Wheel of Time” that began in 1990, and whose final installment was released in 2013, long after this particular book was bought.
As you can see from the pictures, it’s not my name inside the cover. This book clearly, at one stage, belonged to a certain K. Gowthami. Who is that? A friend of mine, you might guess, whose copy I borrowed and never returned. Or a previous owner who left this at a used bookstore? No. None of that. K. Gowthami was a girl who went to my school, but who I did not know at all. Today, I have no idea where she is, and when I try to conjure up a face, I draw a total blank. But I have her book. It has traveled continents with me. How come?
I went to boarding school in India and one year, the Scholastic Book Fair came to visit. My school, Rishi Valley School, did not permit (and I believe still does not permit) electronic devices, so many of us were avid, obsessive readers. When the fair doors opened, each of us entered ravenous, but we were all assigned the same budget. I think it was Rs. 500.
Immediately, this series caught the eye of several us, but each book was priced at Rs. 450. I don’t remember the collusion, the collaborators, the complex negotiations. It must have been very cloak and dagger, like the plot to assassinate Caesar, but nine of us (at the time only nine books were out) each bought a copy and waited our turn to read it. These are long, long books—six, seven hundred pages each. In order to read the series, you have to wait agonizingly for the people ahead of you to be done with their copy.
And you can’t trust that freeloaders and interlopers won’t cut in and read the book; let’s say you’re a girl and a book ends up in one of the boy’s hostels or vice-versa, there’s basically no way to retrieve it. This was a known risk hence K. Gowthami adding the words, PLZ DO NOT FLICK. Flick was boarding school slang for ‘theft.’ The words are ironic now and vaguely accusatory, and I SWEAR I did not steal this book; it just ended up in my possession. I realize how weak that sounds and let me just say, K. Gowthami, like a corporation in a lawsuit, though I admit no wrongdoing (!), I do apologize.
Now, we live in a world of instant information. You want a movie. Rent it HD. You want a book, download its epub to your device. This book to me is a reminder of, at one point in my life, how precious books were; how the next installment might be languishing in girl’s hostel or in the hands of a slow reader, and life just slowed to a crawl; it was pure agony, wondering when, if ever, that manna would make its way to me.
I have many books in my library that, while they aren’t first editions or one-of-a-kind books, their origin stories sing to me. I could easily do a similar post for my beloved copy of Hasidic Tales from the Holocaust or some other book from my small but mighty ‘collection.’
What about you, dear reader? Any books like these that you have lying around?
Written by Raghav Rao
Illustrated by Sophie Lucido Johnson
Office of Modern Composition is a Chicago-based writing studio that both makes compositions and fosters composers. We offer one-on-one coaching for writers and also take on commissions for things you need to have written. We also host free events like our in-person and online co-writes.
 | A guest post by
|