How to Get A Bad Idea
From – where else? – a book. This one or that. In the case of your friend A, it is cleaning guru Marie Kondo’s landmark book The Life-changing Magic of Tidying that her friend P had told her about. In the case of your supersophisticate book editor friend Milly, it is a half-line in Italo Calvino’s if on a winter’s night a traveller – “With a rapid manoeuvre you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First…’ Apparently, the word phalanxes had aroused her into a mammoth book organising mission.
In your case, though, it is a source most unsuspecting. Anne Fadiman’s charming little compendium of bookish essays, Confessions of a Common Reader. Specifically, the first essay, Marrying Libraries. The author and her husband had known each other ten years and lived together six, but only after five years of matrimony and one offspring did they decide to burn all their (other) bridges and marry their libraries once and for all (mixing the as-yet separate collections and keeping only one copy where there were duplicates).
The spouse and your libraries, however, have been married years ago. You can see his War and Gold (Kwasi Kwarteng) rubbing shoulders with your The Forgotten Affairs of Youth (Alexander McCall Smith) and Africa 39 (Ed. By Ellah Allfrey and Binyavanga Wainaina) – purely because their sizes go together very well and contribute to a solid base for a tall tower – and his The Death of Money (James Rickards) lies atop your The Misunderstanding (Irene Nemirovsky), a Freudian conjunction of sorts. On the bedside table, Crimea (Orlando Figes) has ended up with A Fortunate Age (Joanna Rakoff), in the exact same way in which at a party on your terrace, one of his geopolitical buddies might go home with one of the hard-core lit-fic types you favour.
In fact, you keep Anne Fadiman’s book face-down upon the bed and sit up in some excitement, channelling a classic epiphany. What your much married library needs, really, is an assertion of boundaries, some re-sexing if you will. Really, all that these freelance jobs and attendant narratives of bookish poverty have done is to loosen you two in a sea of books. You look this way and that. All around you, there are books floating about. On the window ledges, atop the dining table, towering structures on the dusty durree, and, of course, higgledy-piggledy on bookshelves, layers behind layers. Rows above rows. So much so you have no idea which book is where. There is no logic to the organisation either. You must take the matter in hand immediately.
How to Get to Business After Bad Idea Is Got
Relentlessly pull out books from said window ledges, dining table, durrees, bookshelves, and any other place they’ve crawled into (you might want to check all those bags stashed in the wardrobe – they threw up Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (Mindy Kaling) and the Aghora books – and combine them into a gigantic mess on the floor. Briefly affect a goggle-eyed expression at how the mountain of books in the living area has risen high to obscure the window. At that point, realise what you’ve brought upon yourself.
Uh-oh.
Collapse in a heap next to said pile.
How to Read the Sunlight
Remain collapsed by the window, now so obscured by books that the nature of sunlight seems altered, until you remember there is no audience. Spouse is off meeting his editor.
Now what?
Get up, weakly, and make yourself a cup of tea. Grab the first book atop the mountain. Sip tea while reading it. Marvel at the variations possible in casserole-roasted chicken (Poulet Poêlé À L’Estragon and Poulet en Cocotte Bonne Femme, for example) and types of tarts (Tarte Aux Pommes to Tarte au Fromage Frais et aux Pruneaux), said book being Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck. Tell yourself it is critical for ALL your cookbooks to be handy if you wish to put them to any use ever. Start making a separate pile of books related to food, often by pulling out random books with squeaky oohs and aahs. In retrospect, it is a very bad idea since it causes the original mountain to crash.
Dang, that’s the Doorbell
The spouse returns. Takes one look at the books situation. Sits on the edge of the sofa, buries head in hand, rocks back and forth as though in the throes of acute gastritis. Apparently, his book deadline has been advanced. So he needs peace and quiet. CLUTTER, apparently, is NOISE.
‘Calm Down You Ridiculous Creature,’ You Declaim. ‘I Have It Under Control.’
You come up with a superb plan. You will book him into the guest house that comes with the institute where you spend a few hours every day, pretending to work. He will complete his task. You will complete yours. (There are added advantages of this arrangement. You will have no need to take his suggestions into account; you can also get rid of a few of his books.) At night, exhausted with all the work, you can go to the guest house and put your feet up. It is an elegant solution.
You make the necessary phone calls. There is a minor hitch. The guest house is available only two days hence. A contingent of Sankritists have arrived to conduct a NAAC accreditation. Until they leave the guest house and the room is available, the mountain must remain in place.
Base Camp Moment
After the spouse is finally exiled on Saturday morning, you drink two cups of tea, lovingly caress Abeer Hoque’s stunning hot-off-the-press book the Lovers and the Leavers (though with great moral rectitude you desist from beginning to read it already), download a few sample chapters on the Kindle, and eventually, when you realise it is noon already, you make a survey of the mountain.
You take measurements. Just for fun. By now you’ve got used to its solidity and the changed nature of sunlight. You sniff the books, prod them, pat the ones on top with a feather duster, and finally confront the big question: what is to be the mode of organising the books? Google is full of helpful suggestion. One article recommends creating a chronology of your life – filling the top shelf with books you loved as a child, so on and so forth. Another says the books should be organized in a way that the titles read in succession (say, top right to top left) on each shelf should tell a story. A third lunatic (who definitely works in publishing) suggests stacking books by publisher. Anne Fadiman has her own views on the subject:
“We ran into trouble, however, when I announced my plan to arrange English literature chronologically but American literature alphabetically by author. My defence went like this: Our English collection spanned six centuries, and to shelve it chronologically would allow us to watch the broad sweep of literature unfold before our very eyes. The Victorians belonged together. Separating them would be like breaking up a family. Besides, Susan Sontag arranged her books chronologically. She had told The New York Times that it would set her teeth on edge to put Pynchon next to Plato. So there. Our American collection, on the other hand, was mostly twentieth-century, much of it so recent that chronological distinctions would require Talmudic hairsplitting. Ergo, alphebetisation.”
Finally, in mounting panic, you call your friend Gee.
I Say ‘Hello, Hello, Hello:’
‘Hi,’ says your friend Gee breathily. She is dashing off to a session with her meditation cult. ‘If you think logically, you should keep all the different dals in one place. Use the matching jars I gave you. Put rajma in one, arhar in the next, masur in the third and so on. Ditto for pastas. But larger jars…’
‘Uff,’ you stop her, mid-flow. ‘I am not re-organising the kitchen. I am reorganising my bookshelves!’
‘Oh. Okay. You’re doing the books. That’s wonderful. See if you can find my copy of Banish Clutter Forever. You borrowed it months ago. Before I’d even finished it. But hang on – hadn’t you planned to buy another bookshelf so ALL your books could be properly seen, rather than the current system?’
That reminds you. Of course you had. When you were scouring Fab India last week, you had pondered upon a book rack. Not a book shelf – since your tiny house has no further floor room for bookshelves; you bump into furniture all the time anyway – but something for the wall maybe?
‘Oh yes,’ you say. ‘It can be our Fact and Fiction shelf.’
‘Right. Listen, can I borrow your Paris Review: Interviews, Volume 4? I need it for…’
‘Yes. And Byeeee,’ you finish. Within minutes, you’ve grabbed your bag, dumped the phone into it, slipped on your shoes. You are out of the house and in an auto.
How to Be Crushed At The End of the Day
There is NOTHING in Amar Colony. That is, there are loads of things that you cannot afford or cannot convince the spouse of (an antique laundry chest) or cannot fit into your matchbox (the antique laundry chest). But NOTHING by way of book racks for the wall. In deep disappointment, you decide against returning home. You may as well go to the guest house and check upon the spouse and his book.
Shit Happens. Deal With It.
The stint in the guest house is over. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances (also referred to as sloth) you were unable to step out of the AC in the room in said guest house. So both of you are back in the house, at the same time. The mountain is in its place. Has grown a couple of inches, it seems. You have now decided to wait until you have taken a decision on the book rack. The Fab India one?
There are several problems, however, that might flower out of obsession with said book rack:
a. expenses will be called into question
b. a carpenter will be required
c. carpenter will disturb peace and quiet required for you know whose magnum opus
d. carpenter will not come and incriminating bookshelf will cause massive marital discord (‘What was need for it if it is going to sit on the floor forever?’) which will be compounded by your friend Gee who will flatly deny egging you on.
This state of limbo carries on for a week.
Move Over Dewey Decimal System, We Have the Rasa Method
Every day of the limbo, there is some fight or other about The State of the Books. Like The State of the Nation, it elicits much shouting and name calling, each of you on one side of the mountain, feet planted firmly apart. But no, you cannot allow the spouse to organise the books instead. He would just mess up the perfect system you have devised in your head. (Books Organised According to the Nine Rasas Within Books Organised According to the Places Where They Were Bought.) A beautiful scheme, as evolved as Panini’s Maheshvara Sutra and as natural as Katyayana’s Varnamala. You make loving sketches in your notebooks. You will get the whole thing completed soon. It will be legendary.
Umm…
On the tenth day, your housekeeper R asks if she can cover the mountain with a large table-cloth and use it to stack the china because she is planning to reorganise the kitchen.
Evil Genius
On the fifteenth day, you return from work, with an armful of books: three of Ivan Klìma’s novels for yourself and Black Sea: Coasts and Conquests from Pericles to Putin as a peace offering. You have finally decided on two new bookracks (to be purchased with next month’s salary and placed on either side of the bed). The spouse, that sneaky arm-twisting evil genius, welcomes you with exaggerated warmth and tells you he forgot to mention earlier, but he has invited your mother to come visit for a couple of days. She is arriving tomorrow morning. He looks innocently at you while you fling your bag and shoes (in his direction) and grab the dust cloth. There isn’t even time to kill him. One day you will have good your revenge but for now you have to dismantle the mountain and disperse its contents into the existing homes.
It might take the better part of the night; but it better get done before that flight from Calcutta lands.
Devapriya Roy’s latest book, The Heat and Dust Project, is co-authored with spouse Saurav Jha. Next to their bed is a shelf that is dedicated to their ten-year relationship with the iconic independent bookstore ‘Fact and Fiction’ in Vasant Vihar. Every book mentioned in this piece was bought from the store, thanks to Mr Ajit Vikram Singh, an outstanding curator and lover of books. To the great sorrow of Delhiwallahs, ‘Fact and Fiction’ is going into the good night; but till the end, it maintained its standards with the strictest integrity.
From – where else? – a book. This one or that. In the case of your friend A, it is cleaning guru Marie Kondo’s landmark book The Life-changing Magic of Tidying that her friend P had told her about. In the case of your supersophisticate book editor friend Milly, it is a half-line in Italo Calvino’s if on a winter’s night a traveller – “With a rapid manoeuvre you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First…’ Apparently, the word phalanxes had aroused her into a mammoth book organising mission.
In your case, though, it is a source most unsuspecting. Anne Fadiman’s charming little compendium of bookish essays, Confessions of a Common Reader. Specifically, the first essay, Marrying Libraries. The author and her husband had known each other ten years and lived together six, but only after five years of matrimony and one offspring did they decide to burn all their (other) bridges and marry their libraries once and for all (mixing the as-yet separate collections and keeping only one copy where there were duplicates).
The spouse and your libraries, however, have been married years ago. You can see his War and Gold (Kwasi Kwarteng) rubbing shoulders with your The Forgotten Affairs of Youth (Alexander McCall Smith) and Africa 39 (Ed. By Ellah Allfrey and Binyavanga Wainaina) – purely because their sizes go together very well and contribute to a solid base for a tall tower – and his The Death of Money (James Rickards) lies atop your The Misunderstanding (Irene Nemirovsky), a Freudian conjunction of sorts. On the bedside table, Crimea (Orlando Figes) has ended up with A Fortunate Age (Joanna Rakoff), in the exact same way in which at a party on your terrace, one of his geopolitical buddies might go home with one of the hard-core lit-fic types you favour.
In fact, you keep Anne Fadiman’s book face-down upon the bed and sit up in some excitement, channelling a classic epiphany. What your much married library needs, really, is an assertion of boundaries, some re-sexing if you will. Really, all that these freelance jobs and attendant narratives of bookish poverty have done is to loosen you two in a sea of books. You look this way and that. All around you, there are books floating about. On the window ledges, atop the dining table, towering structures on the dusty durree, and, of course, higgledy-piggledy on bookshelves, layers behind layers. Rows above rows. So much so you have no idea which book is where. There is no logic to the organisation either. You must take the matter in hand immediately.
How to Get to Business After Bad Idea Is Got
Relentlessly pull out books from said window ledges, dining table, durrees, bookshelves, and any other place they’ve crawled into (you might want to check all those bags stashed in the wardrobe – they threw up Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (Mindy Kaling) and the Aghora books – and combine them into a gigantic mess on the floor. Briefly affect a goggle-eyed expression at how the mountain of books in the living area has risen high to obscure the window. At that point, realise what you’ve brought upon yourself.
Uh-oh.
Collapse in a heap next to said pile.
How to Read the Sunlight
Remain collapsed by the window, now so obscured by books that the nature of sunlight seems altered, until you remember there is no audience. Spouse is off meeting his editor.
Now what?
Get up, weakly, and make yourself a cup of tea. Grab the first book atop the mountain. Sip tea while reading it. Marvel at the variations possible in casserole-roasted chicken (Poulet Poêlé À L’Estragon and Poulet en Cocotte Bonne Femme, for example) and types of tarts (Tarte Aux Pommes to Tarte au Fromage Frais et aux Pruneaux), said book being Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck. Tell yourself it is critical for ALL your cookbooks to be handy if you wish to put them to any use ever. Start making a separate pile of books related to food, often by pulling out random books with squeaky oohs and aahs. In retrospect, it is a very bad idea since it causes the original mountain to crash.
Dang, that’s the Doorbell
The spouse returns. Takes one look at the books situation. Sits on the edge of the sofa, buries head in hand, rocks back and forth as though in the throes of acute gastritis. Apparently, his book deadline has been advanced. So he needs peace and quiet. CLUTTER, apparently, is NOISE.
‘Calm Down You Ridiculous Creature,’ You Declaim. ‘I Have It Under Control.’
You come up with a superb plan. You will book him into the guest house that comes with the institute where you spend a few hours every day, pretending to work. He will complete his task. You will complete yours. (There are added advantages of this arrangement. You will have no need to take his suggestions into account; you can also get rid of a few of his books.) At night, exhausted with all the work, you can go to the guest house and put your feet up. It is an elegant solution.
You make the necessary phone calls. There is a minor hitch. The guest house is available only two days hence. A contingent of Sankritists have arrived to conduct a NAAC accreditation. Until they leave the guest house and the room is available, the mountain must remain in place.
Base Camp Moment
After the spouse is finally exiled on Saturday morning, you drink two cups of tea, lovingly caress Abeer Hoque’s stunning hot-off-the-press book the Lovers and the Leavers (though with great moral rectitude you desist from beginning to read it already), download a few sample chapters on the Kindle, and eventually, when you realise it is noon already, you make a survey of the mountain.
You take measurements. Just for fun. By now you’ve got used to its solidity and the changed nature of sunlight. You sniff the books, prod them, pat the ones on top with a feather duster, and finally confront the big question: what is to be the mode of organising the books? Google is full of helpful suggestion. One article recommends creating a chronology of your life – filling the top shelf with books you loved as a child, so on and so forth. Another says the books should be organized in a way that the titles read in succession (say, top right to top left) on each shelf should tell a story. A third lunatic (who definitely works in publishing) suggests stacking books by publisher. Anne Fadiman has her own views on the subject:
“We ran into trouble, however, when I announced my plan to arrange English literature chronologically but American literature alphabetically by author. My defence went like this: Our English collection spanned six centuries, and to shelve it chronologically would allow us to watch the broad sweep of literature unfold before our very eyes. The Victorians belonged together. Separating them would be like breaking up a family. Besides, Susan Sontag arranged her books chronologically. She had told The New York Times that it would set her teeth on edge to put Pynchon next to Plato. So there. Our American collection, on the other hand, was mostly twentieth-century, much of it so recent that chronological distinctions would require Talmudic hairsplitting. Ergo, alphebetisation.”
Finally, in mounting panic, you call your friend Gee.
I Say ‘Hello, Hello, Hello:’
‘Hi,’ says your friend Gee breathily. She is dashing off to a session with her meditation cult. ‘If you think logically, you should keep all the different dals in one place. Use the matching jars I gave you. Put rajma in one, arhar in the next, masur in the third and so on. Ditto for pastas. But larger jars…’
‘Uff,’ you stop her, mid-flow. ‘I am not re-organising the kitchen. I am reorganising my bookshelves!’
‘Oh. Okay. You’re doing the books. That’s wonderful. See if you can find my copy of Banish Clutter Forever. You borrowed it months ago. Before I’d even finished it. But hang on – hadn’t you planned to buy another bookshelf so ALL your books could be properly seen, rather than the current system?’
That reminds you. Of course you had. When you were scouring Fab India last week, you had pondered upon a book rack. Not a book shelf – since your tiny house has no further floor room for bookshelves; you bump into furniture all the time anyway – but something for the wall maybe?
‘Oh yes,’ you say. ‘It can be our Fact and Fiction shelf.’
‘Right. Listen, can I borrow your Paris Review: Interviews, Volume 4? I need it for…’
‘Yes. And Byeeee,’ you finish. Within minutes, you’ve grabbed your bag, dumped the phone into it, slipped on your shoes. You are out of the house and in an auto.
How to Be Crushed At The End of the Day
There is NOTHING in Amar Colony. That is, there are loads of things that you cannot afford or cannot convince the spouse of (an antique laundry chest) or cannot fit into your matchbox (the antique laundry chest). But NOTHING by way of book racks for the wall. In deep disappointment, you decide against returning home. You may as well go to the guest house and check upon the spouse and his book.
Shit Happens. Deal With It.
The stint in the guest house is over. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances (also referred to as sloth) you were unable to step out of the AC in the room in said guest house. So both of you are back in the house, at the same time. The mountain is in its place. Has grown a couple of inches, it seems. You have now decided to wait until you have taken a decision on the book rack. The Fab India one?
There are several problems, however, that might flower out of obsession with said book rack:
a. expenses will be called into question
b. a carpenter will be required
c. carpenter will disturb peace and quiet required for you know whose magnum opus
d. carpenter will not come and incriminating bookshelf will cause massive marital discord (‘What was need for it if it is going to sit on the floor forever?’) which will be compounded by your friend Gee who will flatly deny egging you on.
This state of limbo carries on for a week.
Move Over Dewey Decimal System, We Have the Rasa Method
Every day of the limbo, there is some fight or other about The State of the Books. Like The State of the Nation, it elicits much shouting and name calling, each of you on one side of the mountain, feet planted firmly apart. But no, you cannot allow the spouse to organise the books instead. He would just mess up the perfect system you have devised in your head. (Books Organised According to the Nine Rasas Within Books Organised According to the Places Where They Were Bought.) A beautiful scheme, as evolved as Panini’s Maheshvara Sutra and as natural as Katyayana’s Varnamala. You make loving sketches in your notebooks. You will get the whole thing completed soon. It will be legendary.
Umm…
On the tenth day, your housekeeper R asks if she can cover the mountain with a large table-cloth and use it to stack the china because she is planning to reorganise the kitchen.
Evil Genius
On the fifteenth day, you return from work, with an armful of books: three of Ivan Klìma’s novels for yourself and Black Sea: Coasts and Conquests from Pericles to Putin as a peace offering. You have finally decided on two new bookracks (to be purchased with next month’s salary and placed on either side of the bed). The spouse, that sneaky arm-twisting evil genius, welcomes you with exaggerated warmth and tells you he forgot to mention earlier, but he has invited your mother to come visit for a couple of days. She is arriving tomorrow morning. He looks innocently at you while you fling your bag and shoes (in his direction) and grab the dust cloth. There isn’t even time to kill him. One day you will have good your revenge but for now you have to dismantle the mountain and disperse its contents into the existing homes.
It might take the better part of the night; but it better get done before that flight from Calcutta lands.
Devapriya Roy’s latest book, The Heat and Dust Project, is co-authored with spouse Saurav Jha. Next to their bed is a shelf that is dedicated to their ten-year relationship with the iconic independent bookstore ‘Fact and Fiction’ in Vasant Vihar. Every book mentioned in this piece was bought from the store, thanks to Mr Ajit Vikram Singh, an outstanding curator and lover of books. To the great sorrow of Delhiwallahs, ‘Fact and Fiction’ is going into the good night; but till the end, it maintained its standards with the strictest integrity.
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