8pm Saturday night – when it is time to give up work and rest you grey cells temporarily
Past few weeks have been an error of paradoxes, it is not that I have been down and depressed at not finding the seemingly important Kunzru committee report. I have been almost all over Delhi alone and its fun discovering places by yourself. And most importantly I have found out that you are most alone when you need some very good advice as to which bus stop you should get down at on a strangely numbered bus at times. My to-do list for this week had an awesome number of items I had to tick off before Wednesday, and the first was somewhere on the Barakhamba road which I have crossed and passed on my way from the Connaught place. I did go to the 7th floor of the JNU library once to check out the thesis section to check out their lists which could possibly have a reference to the committee reports for which I am so frantically searching, but 2 very scary bats with teeth flew out and I stepped right back into the lift and calmed myself till I reached the ground floor and then out into the glorious sunlight.
The Indian council of world affairs is still housed in the Sapru house at Barakhamba road, and I was amazed to see so many people in the library together in one huge reading room. And there are bean bags strewn inside the room where the more leisurely kind of people lay down and even set their brains to rest with their books on their chest. My hunt for the report led me to the computerized book hunt room where the librarian in charge of the rare books set a girl to hunt out a book which seemed relevant to me, because it had been bar-coded and set after getting repaired, so it had to be on the racks, or tables somewhere. But the book was not to be found, and the librarian loomed up in front of the poor girl and said menacingly – you are to find this out, if it has been into our section so then it must be here. So please, search it out. They looked and looked and looked but in vain…the poor girl was near tears, and thankfully for me, as I had created the commotion in the first place, I was requested to come back on Monday. I fled.
I went off on my way to the national archives, and the moment I sat down with an index of the home political of a certain year, I saw an extremely familiar face with blue eyes, and it was too good to be true – William Dalrymple. My first brush with nonfiction was because of this man, and there he was right at the next table, bent over yellowed files aging with decay. I wanted to tell him how much I loved his books, and how much I admired his very lucid way of writing and his exciting life right from trinity college to the far off Xanadu and ultimately to the city of the Djins… mustering up courage I did so, and asked him politely about his next ventures which is now a most treasured secret between him and me. I no doubt was having a good day.
Teenmurti has its own charm, wooden paneled book racks, and you could really wish you could lose your way in them and not want to get out ever again. It is at its best when after 6pm, the lights in the lounge are low and there’s a stealthy dim enchanting aura about the library. Sometimes when I am busy turning the wooden handles at the microfilm machine at Teenmurti, I come across various advertisements which endorse either old Cadillac cars available in showrooms at park street in my hometown, or interesting snippets about “how to have healthy hair with jaborandee hair oil”, or may be movie ads like “The Girl With The Gun; starring Sophia Loren (my dad’s once upon a time crush till my mum came along) adult film only/ and the more desi type of a film like – Ayi bahar jhoom ke, starring Asha Parekh”. One day, Souvik also brought to my attention ads like “Suri Towels”, where extremely curvaceous belles drape themselves in towelly fabrics on papers like the Statesman, and Hindustan times and we are left wondering if India has become more conservative over the years… I even learnt that there was something like “microfiche” which was similar to my father’s old slides, except for the fact that his slides contained exciting pictures from his class field trips, and a single microfiche example contained 50 different pages of the “modern review” journal carefully preserved. After I had finished about scanning through 6 months of it for 1940, my eyes started watering, and I got up and pottered all about the microfilm section peeking into what other people were studying. You see, what is the difference between a historian and a detective? Both uncover facts, and both solve mysteries. It is only that detectives (according to the stereotype set down by the baker street man smoking a curved pipe and injecting morphine), wear brown swishy-swashy coats, hats and carry magnifying lenses and rubber soled boots to tread softly upon the ground, peer into imaginary clues and say “hummm-uhaa-ahah!”. It doesn’t have to be that, isn’t history more about breaking away from stereotypes than following them?
Yesterday I was almost the last to leave the archives after Richa got up and walked off. I wanted to get the bus, the files would wait, but my dinner would not J When I finished keeping the “newly emerged onto the scene” files of mine, somebody called me from behind – “are you from d.u?” to which I said no, I am from JNU (I wanted to add, the best place to study in India but I stopped myself) and then we chatted for precisely 4 minutes and I found out that she was doing her PhD on mental asylums, and the history of madness and mad behavior in the Punjab and united provinces in pre independence period. Wishing her all the best, I went off wishing Jaya mam a very cheerful goodnight. Poor woman was sitting all alone in her room waiting for us to clear off. I knew I would be back the next day, but I overslept and that be another story.
Remember you said at the beginning of it all, to enjoy ourselves. I gathered you did not mean by basking away in the sun for hours doing no work or partying away to glory, or smoking pot and pretending to be a statue of david beckham, what you possibly meant was to enjoy working, enjoy exploring, enjoy reading, discarding, and re-reading things, because the very essence of the work is possibly in the journey of its getting completed, and though there are times when I feel suicidal and I feel that my entire thought process is not going anywhere, and I should hunt for a train ticket back home, I stop for a moment and count my blessings. This entire semester is going to be educative, and I am ready to make the most of it. I am enjoying it to the fullest. And I am thankful for your help. I am. Without you it wouldn’t have been possible.
Professor, there are people here, in this department and out of it, student like and not so student like, who constantly keep asking me what it is to be working under your supervision, and when I say this, I do not mean they are using anything else than sneering and ridiculous voices. Inspite of my vehement protests and declarations, they always come up with rude things to say. Let that be, because the only way to deal with this nonsense is possibly to keep your ears open and ignore with a capital “I”. What I meant to tell you is that I am glad you chose me to be under your care. I appreciate the way you help me to go about the work which I try to do. I know I started off on a wrong foot with you when I got my admission, as I had to go home, and did so without meeting you and sending you a funny mail by which you were very right to get offended. End of that story, but the fact that I am getting to know how to poke into primary sources myself is a very important experience, and believe me, nobody has taken so much care in their life to point out every single detail and take us to a huge unmanageable place like the archives, and make a lot of difficult things easier in every step that we are taking. Thank you wholeheartedly for your help. There was a point of time in January when I thought that “if she can work so hard so each of us, let alone me, I can work double hard for her too”. And I just hope I never let you down. Pardon the overt outburst of passion. The next mail will be strictly restricted to the work done.
Yours,
Most chatterboxingly
Oyndrila
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