Love Among the Bookshelves Read online

  I don’t think my aunt and uncle and cousins were too sorry to see me leave. I hadn’t been a nuisance or a liability—I had always handed over half my salary as my small contribution to household expenses—but nor was I an exemplary addition to their family. It was obvious to all that my heart and soul were elsewhere.

  I wasn’t going to lug a large tin trunk any more, with or without haldi. I bought a cheap suitcase, and stuffed it with my books, manuscripts and few clothes. The copy of The Pickwick Papers that I had picked up in Granny’s Dehradun house went into it, along with Richard Jefferies’s The Story of My Heart, which I had discovered in Jersey.

  I was to spend two eventful years in London before returning to India.

  The cheap suitcase served me well. It is still with me today, sixty years later, a repository for old manuscripts and notebooks. Like me, it’s a bit battered but still functioning.

  And I still have my Pickwick and The Story of My Heart.

  Charles Dickens

  For me, Charles Dickens was, and always will be, the greatest novelist in the English language, and for one simple reason. When I was twelve, I discovered David Copperfield, read it right through (complete and unabridged) whenever the routine life of a boarding school permitted, and decided I was going to be a writer. And in a single-minded, determined, Dickensian sort of way, I became one. Not a major writer, but one for whom literature was religion.

  Before I was fifteen I’d read Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, A Tale of Two Cities, Nicholas Nickleby, Sketches by Boz, and the unfashionable Barnaby Rudge. I still dip into The Pickwick Papers from time to time; it’s an antidote for depression and various other ailments.

  I have read Copperfield several times, for the sheer joy of its youthful exuberance. And recently I read Our Mutual Friend for the first time. London’s dockland came to life again for me.

  I don’t think Dickens ever wrote a bad novel; certainly not a dull one. He was consistently brilliant, from the time he took up his pen to create Mr Pickwick and friends to the time in his fifties when he collapsed in the middle of writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood. His greatest novel? The fact that no one seems to agree on it implies that they are all great in their different ways: Bleak House the most mature; The Old Curiosity Shop the most moving; A Christmas Carol the most exuberant; Hard Times the most powerful in terms of exposing social injustices; Great Expectations the most dramatic; Dombey and Son the most innovative. Every lover of Dickens will have his or her favourite. Sometimes our choice may be influenced by external factors, such as the many outstanding films that have been based upon the novels, for the characters, themes and situations lend themselves to dramatic treatment. Dickens himself was a powerful orator, whose readings made him personally popular on both sides of the Atlantic. In his wonderful voice he could, by turn, be Micawber, or Sam Weller, or Scrooge, or Marley’s ghost, or Mrs Gamp. ‘What a face is his to meet in a drawing room!’ exclaimed the writer Leigh Hunt. ‘It has the life and soul in it of fifty human beings.’

  This energy, this light and motion, comes through in all his books, and especially in my own favourite. ‘In David Copperfield,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘characters swarm and life flows through into every creek and cranny, some common feeling—youth, gaiety, hope—envelops the tumult, brings the scattered parts together, and invests the most perfect of all the Dickens novels with an atmosphere of beauty.’

  From The Pickwick Papers (1837) by Charles Dickens

  To ladies and gentlemen who are not in the habit of devoting themselves practically to the science of penmanship, writing a letter is no easy task; it being always considered necessary in such cases for the writer to recline his head on his left arm, so as to place his eyes as nearly as possible on a level with the paper, and, while glancing sideways at the letters he is constructing, to form with his tongue imaginary characters to correspond. These motions, although unquestionably of the greatest assistance to original composition, retard in some degree the progress of the writer; and Sam had unconsciously been a full hour and a half writing words in small text, smearing out letters with his little finger, and putting in new ones which required going over very often to render them visible through the old blots, when he was roused by the opening of the door and the entrance of his parent.

  ‘Vell, Sammy,’ said the father.

  ‘Vell, my Prooshan Blue,’ responded the son, laying down his pen. ‘What’s the last bulletin about mother-in-law?’

  ‘Mrs Veller passed a very good night, but is uncommon perwerse, and unpleasant this mornin’. Signed upon oath, Tony Veller, Esquire. That’s the last vun as was issued, Sammy,’ replied Mr Weller, untying his shawl.

  ‘No better yet?’ inquired Sam.

  ‘All the symptoms aggerawated,’ replied Mr Weller, shaking his head. ‘But wot’s that, you’re a-doin’ of? Pursuit of knowledge under difficulties, Sammy?’

  ‘I’ve done now,’ said Sam, with slight embarrassment. ‘I’ve been a-writin’.’

  ‘So I see,’ replied Mr Weller. ‘Not to any young ‘ooman, I hope, Sammy?’

  ‘Why it’s no use a-sayin’ it ain’t,’ replied Sam. ‘It’s a walentine.’

  ‘A what!’ exclaimed Mr Weller, apparently horror-stricken by the word.

  ‘A walentine,’ replied Sam.

  ‘Samivel, Samivel,’ said Mr Weller, in reproachful accents, ‘I didn’t think you’d ha’ done it. Arter the warnin’ you’ve had o’ your father’s wicious propensities; arter all I’ve said to you upon this here wery subject; arter actiwally seein’ and bein’ in the company o’ your own mother-in-law, vich I should ha’ thought wos a moral lesson as no man could never ha’ forgotten to his dyin’ day! I didn’t think you’d ha’ done it, Sammy, I didn’t think you’d ha’ done it!’ These reflections were too much for the good old man. He raised Sam’s tumbler to his lips and drank off its contents.

  5

  Those Two Years in London

  I was lonely in London.

  Living alone in a big city, working in an office from nine to five, and coming back to a gas fire in an empty bed-sitting room, was not what I wanted out of life. I’d go out to eat in a small cafe, then return to my room, put a sheet of paper into my small portable typewriter, and type out a page or two of my novel. It was into its second draft. And there would be a third before it finally found favour with its eventual publisher.

  Diana Athill, my publisher’s editor, was kind and helpful. The people in the Photax office, where I worked, were kind and friendly. My landlady was kind and solicitous. Or I should say landladies, because I had at least three of them, one after another—Belsize Park, Haverstock Hill, Swiss Cottage—all Jewish landladies, widows I think, who never troubled or scolded me if I came in late or played my radio too loudly. One of them gave me breakfast with my room. Scrambled eggs and occasionally a kipper. This helped sustain me, because for lunch—at a snack bar near the office—it was almost always baked beans on toast, the cheapest item on their menu.

  People were kind.

  But I was lonely.

  I had no companions of my own age. So I went to the pictures. And once a month to the theatre. And I dropped in at Foyles and bought old books. And I came home to my empty room and lit the gas fire and worked on my book.

  After about six months on my own, I found I was losing vision in my right eye. It was as though I was looking at the world through a shifting cloud. I took vitamins—they had been ‘discovered’ only recently—and experimented with various eye drops, but the cloud only got darker and denser. So I went to a doctor, who said it needed further investigation and got me admitted to the Hampstead General Hospital. Here various specialists came to see me. One said I was suffering from malnutrition; true enough. Another said I had Eales Disease, a rare condition of the retina. A third felt it had something to do with a sluggish liver. (I’d suffered from jaundice in the past.) Tests showed that my inte
stines were full of amoebiasis, no doubt brought with me from India; and I was put on a course of emetine injections, which made me feel awful. Then my eye, or rather retina, was photographed by a high-intensity camera, and the resultant picture appeared in a medical journal (not my picture, only the eye); I had to wait a few years before my own mugshot appeared in a newspaper.

  Once the amoeba had been vanquished, I (or rather my sick eye), was given cortisone injections, cortisone then being the wonder drug that was supposed to clear up all sorts of intractable conditions. This left my poor eye looking rather bloody and fierce, prompting one fellow patient to remark that I could have passed for the phantom of the opera.

  Weakened by the emetine and various laxatives, I found myself too weak to get up in order to visit the loo, so I was given the privilege of having a bedpan. This occasioned some raillery from the others in the ward (it was a general ward with about twenty beds), who labelled me the BP Superman—the Bedpan Superman, after the British Petroleum Superman who was on all the hoardings.

  I did improve rapidly, and was soon making the rounds of the ward, interviewing the other patients like a doctor on the rounds, quizzing them on their ailments and recommending purgatives and the Bedpan.

  The book trolley did the rounds every day, and I read a book a day, discovering the stories of William Saroyan (My Name is Aram and The Human Comedy), Denton Welch (A Voice through a Cloud) and Josephine Tey (The Daughter of Time).

  Saroyan had grown up in an Armenian immigrant community in California, and in his stories he captured the essence of small-town life in his part of the world. He won the Pulitzer Prize with his play The Time of Your Life and was very popular in the 1940s and ’50s, but most of his work is now out of print.

  Denton Welch was a promising young English writer who had a tragic accident while riding his bicycle on a country road. He was knocked down and run over by a lorry. For over a year he lingered between life and death, and during this period he managed to write his very moving account of his struggle to recover. He succumbed to his many injuries. I hope A Voice through a Cloud is reprinted some day. His earlier travel book, Maiden Voyage, should also be revisited.

  Josephine Tey wrote several detective novels during her short life. In The Daughter of Time, the novel I read in my hospital bed, her detective, Inspector Grant, finds himself in a hospital bed and passes the time by trying to reconstruct the murder of the Princes in the Tower, and with the help of his research assistant proves that it was King Henry VII and not King Richard III who was responsible for their deaths. A historical whodunnit, resolved without moving from the hospital bed. No fast-paced action, but suspenseful all the same.

  How sad that such fine writers should be neglected or forgotten. Time and changing fashions take their toll on the best talents. Only a handful survive.

  Sometimes short stories have a better chance of survival, because the good ones get picked up for inclusion in anthologies, and then get selected again and again. One of my earliest short stories, ‘The Eyes Have It’, is still turning up in anthologies and school readers, fifty years after it was first written. But once a novel goes out of print it is hard to revive it. And novels date very quickly. Sometimes too much extraneous matter goes into them, whereas the best short stories stick to the essentials.

  When I wrote The Room on the Roof I had published only two or three short stories, so what was I, still a pimply and skinny youth, doing, trying to write a novel?

  In a way it was a mistake, because in writing it I used up all the experience I had of life and was left with nothing for a second novel!

  But it had to be written.

  That last year in Dehra, before I left for England, was now so ingrained in me, so much a part of my emotional make-up, that it had to be expressed in the way I knew best—the written word. The journal had become a novel, and Somi, Krishan, Meena and the rest stayed alive for me on the printed page. Though it might never be published—and I couldn’t be sure of this during the four years that various drafts shuttled between me and André Deutsch’s editor, Diana Athill—the thing had been done, the catharsis had been completed, and I could think of other people, other loves, and try something different.

  My editor, Diana Athill, was then a young woman in her thirties. Many years later she was to become quite a celebrity, the author of several successful autobiographies, frank and revealing and beautifully written. But when I knew her she hadn’t done any writing (or none that I know of), although she was very busy assessing and introducing the work of many promising young writers, novelists such as Jack Kerouac, V.S. Naipaul. And although she did not (could not) teach me how to write (I stubbornly refused to temper my addiction to semicolons and certain Indianisms), she made me feel that I was part of her literary world, giving me gossip about other writers and telling me about the books they were publishing. I visited her at her flat in Regent’s Park quite often, and even took her to see an Indian picture, Aan (the first to get a commercial release in London) but it was a terrible let-down, a very silly film, the sort of Bombay extravaganza that gave a completely misleading and over-romanticized conception of India. I felt more at ease introducing her to paan at a little Indian restaurant near Fitzroy Square, but I’m afraid she didn’t care much for paan either. My efforts to make Diana an Indophile were not very successful. But she liked my book. ‘I can see why you love India,’ she said. ‘It’s so easy to make friends.’

  But my first appearance in print (in London, that is) really came about as a result of my lengthy stay in the Hampstead General Hospital. A fellow patient, an English boy of about my age (perhaps a little younger), turned out to be a good reader, and when he was discharged he gave me a copy of a magazine for teenagers called the Young Elizabethan. A couple of months later, when I was back at my typewriter I sent them one of my short stories. It was published, and paid for. And even after I’d returned to India I continued to write for the Elizabethan, and several of my early stories appeared in it—‘The Thief’, ‘The Long Day’, ‘The Big Race’, ‘The Stolen Daffodils’, among others—until it finally closed down.

  And while still in that hospital bed, I had written a piece called ‘My Two Homes’—about an English boy growing up in an Indian home—and this became a talk that I gave on BBC Radio. The BBC’s Home Service also ran a weekly short-story programme, and when I returned to India and started freelancing, many of my early stories found a home with them. ‘The Night Train at Deoli ’, ‘The Woman on Platform 8’, and many others were read by Robert Rietty, a fine actor in radio plays. Back in Dehra, I would drop in on a friend who had a short-wave radio, and listen spellbound to my stories being beamed to me from distant London.

  So my two-year stay in London was a good preparation for the years of struggle that lay ahead, when I returned to India. Although my job was a dull one, I did find time to write, to read, to visit the theatre, to wander about the streets of London (getting to know that city fairly well), and so banishing the loneliness that awaited me whenever I returned to my cold bed-sitting room.

  And there were friends, too. Students mostly, who came in and out of my life at random.

  Pravin, a Gujarati boy who was a little younger than me; he liked visiting pubs and night clubs! I had no idea what he was studying—I never saw him with a book—but he was the recipient of regular remittances from his father in Bombay.

  Thanh, a Vietnamese, who cultivated me because he wanted to ‘improve his English’; he dropped me when he discovered I spoke English with an Indian accent.

  Vu-phuong, also Vietnamese, who used to tell me my fortune with tea leaves. When you finish drinking your tea, you let the tea leaves settle naturally, and the pattern they form gives you an indication of what to expect in the future. This was great fun, because it meant sharing innumerable cups of tea with Vu, with whom I fell in love. But when I asked her to marry me, she said it was not in the tea leaves.

  Just a
s well, perhaps. If I’d been married in England (or Vietnam), I might never have returned to India.

  And returning to India was still very much my first priority.

  But first I had to save a little money, publish my novel, and try to see a little better with my right eye.

  The best way to get to know a city is to walk all over the place. So I walked all over Soho and the West End; I walked from Primrose Hill down to Baker Street, looking for Sherlock Holmes, but couldn’t find him; I walked all over East End, looking for places described by Dickens in Oliver Twist and Our Mutual Friend, but they looked very different from what I’d imagined; I walked around Kensington Gardens, looking for Peter Pan, but he must have been away in Neverland. So I went to Kew Gardens and felt quite at home in a big glass hothouse surrounded by tropical plants of every description. After that, whenever I felt homesick, I went down to Kew—not just in lilac time, but any time . . .

  André Deutsch finally gave me a £50 advance on The Room on the Roof. I did not wait for it to be published, but bought a ticket to Bombay for £40; gave a week’s notice to my kind employers who presented me with a travel bag; and went aboard the S.S. Batory at Southampton, accompanied by the said travel bag and my old suitcase bulging with books and a few clothes. It was March 1955 and I was twenty-one years old. I had left India to seek my fortune in the West; and now I was returning to the East to find, if not fortune, at least fulfilment of a sort.

  Although I was over twenty, and had been earning my own living for over three years, in many ways I was still a boy, with a boy’s thoughts and dreams—dreams of romance and high adventure and good companionship. And I was still a lonely boy, alone on that big ship—passengers and crew all strangers to me—sailing into an uncertain future.