Happy Places

It is all in my head - Bhasker

Happiness in life is the fulfilment of childhood desires - Freud

It's a memory technique, a sort of mental map. You plot a... a map with a location - it doesn't have to be a real place - and then you deposit memories there that... theoretically, you can never forget anything. All you have to do is find your way back to it. - Dr. Watson about Sherlock Holmes’ Mind Palace

I will let you into one of the rooms in my mind palace because I think that you would like visiting it. I haven’t added any further decorations to the room since I originally built it in my youth. But, it is a room that I visit often. Because, it brings memories of sunshine, a younger world and fewer worries.

Stay with me as I walk you through it.

During my teenage years, one of the best ways that I could spend a Saturday would be to take a trip to the British Library in Madras (yes, it is still the city of Madras in my mind, no matter what everyone calls it now). One of the sensible things that my father did was to get hold of a British Library membership. I don’t know how he did it because the wait time was supposed to be interminable. And so, for a glorious couple of years, I had access to it.

I would get there around 10.30 am, but, instead of going to the Library first, I would do a short detour to Anand theater which was practically next door. Anand theater was one of the few in the city that screened English movies. And, their advance reservation counter would open at 10.30 am. I would get a ticket for the matinee show (which movie? Did it really matter?)

And, then, I would go to the library. The British Library was a great place. It was air-conditioned (if you are from Madras or visited that place, you would know why that is such a big deal, especially in those days!). I liked the hush of the place. It was a place where you could be alone with your books without being lonely! And for a high-functioning quiescent introvert like me, that was almost worth the price of admission.

The staff always seemed friendly; a little extra friendly towards me because I was almost always the youngest one in the library. When I borrowed or returned books, they would always comment on my reading choices. Most of the time, they looked at my reading choices with amusement, sometimes with consternation and sometimes with respect.

It was heartening to see fellow-readers; the citizens of a reading nation, if you will. There would be conversations with strangers, almost always quiet as if most occupants felt that they were in a temple of worship. I remember an old man picking a conversation with me when he saw me holding a book by Henry Cecil. He asked me whose recommendation it was and when I told him that it was my father’s, he said that my father was giving me the best of recommendations. I already knew that to be true, having tested that hypothesis multiple times (may be, I will talk about how much my father had influenced my reading in another blog post).

British Library was my source for books by P.G. Wodehouse, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, not to mention Henry Cecil, W.W. Jacobs and Jerome K. Jerome. (Sadly, they didn’t carry any James Hadley Chase, Alistair MacLean or Desmond Bagley; I found much later in life that all these were British authors too).

I read big SF anthologies, unheard-of PGW books and hilarious Henry Cecil books from the library.

I would return the books I borrowed and spend the first hour browsing through the aisles of books. For a bibliophile and a logophile like me, it was the closest to being in heaven. Before I started going there, I had the erroneous impression that they only carried books by British authors but found out on my first visit that they only carried books published in the UK.

I would pick the books that I wanted to borrow and others that I wanted to read in the future that I could skim through and find a seat. The other thing about the British Library was that they had extraordinarily comfortable seats. Perfect for reading (or for falling asleep as I found a few doing).

I never looked through the books that I was borrowing but skimmed through the others that I was going to whet for future reading. I read their dust jackets, smelled the paper (honestly, I did :)) and read random pages from those books. Years later, when I read any of those books for the first time (for, I didn’t always borrow those books on future visits; they were either unavailable or I had forgotten about them; I was terrible at taking notes!), I would always wonder why certain passages seemed so familiar.

Most likely, by this time, it was time for me to go the movie. I would check out my books and carry them to the movie as if I was going to school, drawing strange looks from others in the theater. Who brings books to a movie theater? I would sit in the theater (air-conditioned!) and continue reading my books until they turned the lights off.

I mostly remember how it felt to be going home at the end of the day after a good day’s work (or non-work). And years later now, sometimes I wonder how my life may have turned out if I didn’t read. But I can’t! Reading is so much a part of my ethos, heck a part of the Thodlas’ ethos, that I simply can’t imagine living my life any other way.

And now, let me turn out the lights in this room and put the Faraday’s cage around it so that it stays intact in years to come, for, I see much need for its use.

Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon a Time is forever - by another great British author - Philip Pullman