Picking up a lost hobby

 Casual reading is a hobby that is steadily on the decline for me since the past few years, especially since I graduated and started working. As a meme goes, sometimes I do wonder if I am the same 14-year-old girl who had managed to squeeze all those novels into my daily evening schedule among the heaps of homework and assignments that the teachers used to bless us with. Somewhere along the line, I shifted to reading blog posts and small write ups instead of committing myself to books. Occasionally, when I do pay a visit to Goodreads, I become conscious of the various books that I had opened and left incomplete. It is a list of various grades of ‘incompleteness’ in a way.

An accumulation of this guilt over a long time finally made me take up a rather doable Goodreads challenge for 2024; to complete atleast 12 books by the end of the year. I am happy to say it’s been going rather well so far. However, I am still not able to stick with one book and finish it before picking up another one. I think I can point to three books that have helped me carry on despite my constant bouts of self-doubt and existential dread this year.

Perhaps, the most striking book that I read this year was ‘A Room of One’s Own’ by Virginia Woolf. It was also the first book I read this year, to assuage my guilt of not reading enough in the last few years. I decided to start the year with this book as it was in my to-read list for the longest time. It would be no hyperbole to say that I was awestruck by Woolf’s clarity of thoughts and astuteness of observations about the conditions that have kept women chained to the domestic world. It is truly a testament to the value of her work that even close to a century after its publication, the reflections from the book still ring true for the most part. The kind of humility and camaraderie that the observations in the book instilled in me is beyond description. There was an overwhelming sense of oneness that I felt with generations of women, known and unknown to me, as I progressed with the book.

Consider the following lines:

“…And if one asked her, longing to pin down the moment with date and season, but what were you doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875, she would look vague and say she could remember nothing. For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it…”

I thought of all my female ancestors who were prevented from going to school or getting an education and whose lives were fashioned by the social values of their times. I thought of my grandmother who loves reading novels and weeklies and wondered whether she would have enjoyed this book had she had the opportunity for higher education. I thought of my mother and her peers who despite their higher education had to make career sacrifices for the sake of family because that was what was expected of them according to the values of their time. The book made me feel so small but also conscious of the various privileges that I sometimes take for granted as a woman; a combination of various socio-cultural and familial factors that women who lived in my hometown at the time that the book was written would not have even been able to dream of. 

I do not think I can describe Woolf’s work better than a Goodreads review which is still afresh in my mind; “This was a book I needed when I was a teenager, need today as a grown up, and will need tomorrow as I grow into an old woman”. I am only sad that I did not get my hands on this work sooner.

Another book that I read this year was ‘Kaivariyude Thekkeyatam’ (Trans: The Southern End of the Railing) by the late P Padmarajan, a celebrated Malayalam writer and movie director. This is a collection of short stories written in Malayalam. I picked it up from my dad’s library on one of my weekend visits to Kerala. Being an ardent fan of the many Malayalam movies directed by Padmarajan and having fallen in love with his depictions of romance, female friendships and the depth of characterisation he bestows upon his women characters, I was really excited about reading this collection of short stories. I was perhaps drawn to the book also because the rather simple title of the book evoked a mental imagery of the lush green village side of Kerala from the yesteryears.

By and large, the short stories in this collection were set in a slightly dated time period and told from the perspective of male characters. There were a few absurd comedies, a few melancholic tales and a lot of stories about the mundane lives people lead. Having loved Padmarajan’s movie heroines who have daringly questioned the Malayali morality of the times, I was a bit disappointed with the way some women characters were portrayed in this collection of stories. Women characters were prominent only in stories that revolved around sexual abuse and sex work. But more than that, the way the characters themselves handled the situations in these stories feel certainly dated by today’s cultural norms. In my humble opinion, this is unfortunately a malady that is prevalent in the way even the most celebrated male Malayalam novelists write about women. Even the greats such as M T Vasudevan Nair (in Naalukettu) or O V Vijayan (in Khasakkinte Ithihasam or The Legends of Khasak) have deployed the sexually liberated woman as a plot device for the character growth of their male heroes; someone for the male hero to find warmth in when he is lost and then to discard, with no qualms, as soon as he finds greener pastures. The woman is, all of a sudden, then reduced to a damsel who has to unfortunately deal with her own distress and melancholy without the hero’s aid.

But I digress. The titular story, Kaivariyude Thekkeyatam, is a story about a boatman who had to give up his profession when the government built a bridge connecting the two banks which formed their village. With the new bridge in place, there was no need for boats to travel between the banks. Many boatmen moved on to other vocations. The boatman in question instead decided to voluntarily station himself daily at the southern end of the main bridge in the village. He would sit on the “southern end of the railing” from morning to night, as the location gave him the strategic advantage of observing the happenings in and around the riverbank. He was disinterested in going to work or fending for his family. He was frequently asked by the villagers; ‘are you mad? Is there any purpose to your life and to what you do?’ All that was said by the man in response was a silent smile. The popular perception of the man changed eventually after he rescued a young boy from drowning. He was then bestowed with praises and cash award. Despite the newfound popularity, life continued without any change for the man and he never left his daily schedule of sitting by the southern end of the railing. He died eventually and was fondly remembered by the villagers as the bravest man in the village. As years went by, the bridge itself came to be known in his name, and the man became an idol to the younger generations in the village. To his family, however, he remained the negligent father.

Does this story merit a discussion at all? Would I have even mentioned this had it not had the title that initially drew me to the book itself? Truthfully, I do not know the answer myself. What I do know is, sometimes in life, inane stories of seemingly carefree people who live rooted to where they find themselves in and invariably find things to entertain themselves can be oddly comforting. After all, they emphasize that life has no grand purpose or meaning and we all are here trying to move along, one day at a time.

What I am currently reading too traverses the grand questions of purpose in life and existentialism in a way. I am reading a collection of poems by Kahlil Gibran curated by Neil Douglas-Klotz and titled ‘Kahlil Gibran’s Little Book of Life’. I make it a point to read atleast one poem from this collection in the morning, while sipping my cup of tea or waiting for my uber auto. Gibran’s poems carry a sort of soothing quality in them, which make for a quick and rejuvenating morning read. His short and simple verses on life and nature have served as much-needed affirmations to start my days of late, and also as a reminder about maintaining a more stoic outlook on life in general.

“In truth, we talk only to ourselves,

But sometimes we talk loud enough

That others may hear us”

 – Kahlil Gibran, Talk