For Love of words

by Manish Anand

A great sight yesterday was an old Sikh with a book yellowed due to ages, reading intensely while he came out to his gallery out of curiosity to peep at the bustling road below his window. Books, which give reasons to live, are still vogue, and many more people are reading them. Most exciting sight was a girl reading a novel while waiting for the Metro standing among innumerable people jostling for a space. Nothing can get the girl away from the book that she was soaked into.

I shared my literary passion with a one-time room-mate, Solgy, now an Indian Revenue Service Officer. Recently, as we chatted I dangled my great experience or having read “100 years of solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Expecting that it will lead to discussion on Marquez’s masterful skill of story-telling, I was caught unaware as he gave me a virtual dressing down.

“You bloody! You read this book now! You should have read it 10 years ago. What a pity you could have been a different person if you had read the book earlier,” he retorted.

Then, he went on to tell about his experience with Marquez. “I first read the malyalam translation, and feeling restless I read the English version. The moment I finished reading, it I began re-reading it. What a book! The magical realism in literature at its best. You believe while you read all the stuff,” bristled Solgy.

Then he read out “when humidity peaked, the fish started flying”. Reading and re-reading a fiction are testimony of a good book as Garcia Marquez wrote in his autobiography “Living to tell a tale”. “I did not consider a book good as long as I did not re-read it,” says Marquez.

Yes, I am under the spell of Marquez with his exquisite writing. I do not think I am going to stop as long as I read most of his literature.

As Marquez reproduces the words of red-light district girls, it turns out the masterful skill of presenting a world so distant to be so near that you can find it in your neighbourhood. “I you people fucked the way you all shout, we girls would have bathed in gold.” Only a genius could come up with such masterful portrayal.

The other evening I was reading the autobiography while the bureau chief of the newspaper I work for came and asked what I was reading. The moment I took the name of Garcia Marquez, the boss came alive, brimming with all energy. “A great artist. What a wonder." Glee in his eyes, he poured his art out for the great Latin American Novelist.

“Read his small book, Chronicle of a death foretold,” he told me. “What a book. In the first sentence, he tells what the whole story. And, then he goes for another 100 pages, and you remain glued to the book,” said my boss with energy so original. “The book is all about our helplessness. We know that we all are doomed, but still we can not do anything,” he said about the book.

Again elaborating, he gave his parting note about the book as he walked away. “You know that you are being fucked, but you can not do anything about it.”

The world of literature can live till humanity lasts for the talent of Gabriele Garcia Marquez.