On phantom-buses, neighbourhood goddesses and railway time-tables

In our house, there are lots and lots of books. In any shelf in any room that you turn your eyes to, you will beheld at least ten books. As a child, I took to the habit of trying to identify the owner of the book and the year of its addition in our family library by analyzing the book itself.
A tawny-hued book on an abstruse topic like Tropical medicine or Tribes of India’s North-East, could belong to none but my Dadu and it had to be at least a fifty years old. He was a doctor who started practicing in the 1940s in the-then NEFA front, a strict disciplinarian who considered reading as a mental exercise, as a tool of cultivating one’s intellect and was disdainful of fiction.
A racy American thriller with a dog-eared jacket or a tome on Vedanta philosophy with torn pages-and my guesses were inevitably always correct in this matter-belonged to my father; an avid but careless reader who read at bed and while traveling. And while on vacation. And while drinking tea!
A Bengali novel with images of vanity-purse flaunting women and suited men kept with great care, in some shelf had to belong to my mom. She loved to arrange and organize things and she ensured that all her belongings whether it be the-no-longer –usable fountain pen she had owned since she appeared for ‘Matric exam’ or her books, were always kept in their appropriate places. She loved reading romances by the likes of Buddhadeb Bose, Nabanita Debsen and the like but so did my grandmother. Hence, I had the toughest time in playing Sherlock, when I tried to figure who could the owner of Bengali romances be?
A Danielle Steel or a Sidney Sheldon title, if not torn, had to be my chotomashi’s. She sweared by the Readers Digest and sternly rebuked me whenever she saw me eyeing any of her books.
Not that she was the only one to reprimand me for being curious to read ‘boroder boi’; I was told in strictest of terms that I should stick to reading my own books and that I should not get inquisitive about titles which I was too young to read. I, being an obedient child of the first order who also happened to be scared to see frowning countenances around me, never ventured to touch ‘their’ books but read the ones which they bought for me or let me buy at the book fairs with great relish and gusto!
When I was ten, my Dida bought me ‘Chotoder Golpo Shanchayan’ an anthology first published in the 1920s. I had barely learnt to read Bangla then and was not familiar with any of the names included in the list of contributors. It was a winter afternoon and on our way back from the book fair, where she had purchased the book, my granny explained to me, “This is one of the first books I had read as a child. A copy of this book was there in my father’s house. I am so glad that they have republished it; may I read it first, dear?” I had ignored her sentimental request and instead asked her, suspiciously, “You had read it when you were a kid? You are so old yourself.Is it possible that this book was written so long ago? And if it was, are you sure its in Bangla?” My dida had laughed at the question but indeed most of its stories were not written in the Bengali which I could comprehend. They were written in ‘sadhu bhasa’ which was used actively till about the 1940s, I guess. I was disappointed to discover that I could not read the stories myself which had been categorized under different headings such as Horror, Fairy-tales, Historical, Social, Humorous etc. but my granny decided to initiate me to the charms of the book and to refresh her own memories, by reading out the stories to me.
There was ‘Iicha puran’ by Tagore, the now oft-told tale of a middle-aged father who is rueful of his wasteful habits as a child and yearns to amend the mistakes of his childhood by being a child again like his son and of his mischievous son who, fed up of the restrictions imposed on him, desires wholeheartedly to become an independent adult like his father so that no one can scold him for having candies all day! A goddess who was passing by their house, does fulfill the wishes of the father-son duo and the story chronicles the ensuing disastrous consequences. I had laughed my heart out after listening to this story and had marveled if goddesses still ‘pass by houses’ as do vegetable vendors and carpenters?
But even more hilarious was the story ‘Time-table’ by Sunirmal Basu which narrated the story of the misadventures of a group of boys who decided to visit their friend in Bihar during their Christmas vacations of 1928 and ended up traveling by the wrong train and knocking at the doors of a stranger in a different city because they had referred to the train time-table of 1926, instead of 1928! I was so thrilled to think that people traveled by trains, or visited friends, or disobeyed parents in 1928. Yes, yes. it does sound like an utterly silly line of thought to take up but when you are a ten year old with a penchant for fantasising about life and habits in bygone eras, such a reverie is indispensable for you.
On one yellow, soporific winter afternoon, I had found myself crying silently after listening to the story ‘Srikanter nisith abhijan’ by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay(better known as the author of Devdas) about the rite of passage of a boy during his adventures of a single night with a friend. In the story, Srikanta, the protagonist, makes a heart-searing observation about his friend which roughly translated, would be something like the following-
“Oh God! You have bestowed your bounties on all and sundry-you have gifted mortals with intellect and beauty, wealth and power. But upon how many have you bestowed the gift of courage in the manner you did on------? Why did you make him so brave that unlike the rest of us, he did not, could not, fear even death?”
The other stories had memorable lines too; the one called ‘Pagoler Mela’ by the master of short-stories, Premendra Mitra was about the impoverished kingdom of a worthless king whose courtiers and ministers have nothing better to do than to bicker with each other all day over trivial matters. I had, even with my little appreciation for wit at the age of ten, gloated over the originality of the lines like-
“The powerful army of the vast kingdom has innumerable fine horses. They make their presence felt every day by neighing whenever they are not fed, such fine horses are they!” And there was another one, “The king is so mighty and formidable that there are no thieves in the kingdom. The robbers complain that they can never earn their efforts’ worth there!” All these tales left an indelible mark on my mind; that literary stalwarts of Bengal had contributed to the anthology is indicative of the fact that children literature was considered a serious genre in those days. The greatness of these stories lies in their timelessness; no matter what one’s age is, she cannot but appreciate their riveting plots and the fact that they all enriched the readers' imagination. For instance,the horror story called ‘Konkal sharothi’ revolving around the spine-chilling experiences of a young man who boarded, in a state of fever, what he called a phantom bus, articulates the umpteen sounds which can be heard by a pair of keen ears on a desolate, silent night, is bound to fire a child’s imagination and teach him to not to be scared of the darkness. The best thing about all the stories in ‘Chotoder golpo shanchayan’ was that they treated young readers as intelligent, sensitive beings with strong power of rationalization and a stronger sense of imagination. Never did they tend to be simplistic. Hence, never did they lose their charm for me!