trips.. fips.. and grips

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10th of October

“In the last 30 and a half years, there has been NO trip to national library, or a visit to a bookshop.”

Guess who stated this fact. Yep you are right our dear own Ms. R. Sachdev.

This line left us all astonished. Why? Because let me tell you it was probably more pleasurable than 99.9% of the things that I have ever gone to visit.

These trips are something that all of us look forward to, even if it is just to the top of an empty stairwell. Why? Because we are not just going to the top but on an adventure towards it… something that makes it more memorable..

All the hearts throbbing, pulsing with anticipation, that makes our blood race with adrenaline, making us notice every single tiny detail, not just keep it in the subconscious part of our brain but in our hearts forever.

This October, the Morpheme went ouring. Yep you heard right… the bookish nerds went on an adventure.

We trudged through a hall ancient texts, first editions. The beauty of calligraphy, smell of those old books, feel of the manuscripts was mesmerising.

But guess what caught my attention? The vaults, it was more wondrous than the Gringotts of my dreams, even though it wasn’t guarded by mystical dragons or managed by goblins, because it had books instead of money. Wit beyond measure is after all man’s greatest treasure.

But like the well prophesied vaults of Harry Potter, if you got locked inside you wouldn’t be able to leave it.

Then came the literary hall-- Shelves and shelves of books all arranged in perfect rows and columns. You could even play hide and seek and never ever get caught. One of my friends asked me if she could hide and stay there forever. She said that she  would only need food and a place to sleep and she would be perfectly content, and if i would be kind enough to deliver her that. But alas, our life is not just there…. We had to move ahead and see for ourselves if what the books say is true.  We need to explore our own destiny. Afterall, life has always awarded those who dared.

While we were leaving this huge place which holds books of almost anything and everything, we notice a pile of books, which seemed yellow, and withered. It seemed as if they were centuries old, and wanted us to touch them , hold them, read them, and keep them in the cradles of human civilisation forever. But as it turned out, they weren’t very old, but they had been stacked out because they needed to be repaired.

Next came the newspapers… Every single newspaper that had ever been published in India, or even abroad was stocked. Starting from the James Hickey's Bengal Gazette, to the present day Times of India, Telegraph or any other paper you ask for. Not just English ones, all regional language one’s too.

Trust me even if you hate reading newspaper you would love them.

No, not because they are arranged on the shelves in a pretty manner but rather because they are wrapped in bubble paper. Something that all of us itch to touch, finger, and burst the bubbles of.

Secretly between you and me, I have blasted a lot of those bubbles.

Now, we head to the reading room. Hush, hush, hush, people are studying. No one speaks to another. Whatever competitive exam you are studying for, this is the ideal safe haven to keep calm and study on. Believe me even your own phone will not distract you because your conscience will tell you to study (something that rarely happens). The energy, the vibes around you will make you want to work for whatever you need to.

Oops, I missed out the huge maps of anything and everything. I have a belief that there is a treasure map somewhere in the midst of them all, hidden from the naked eye, or maybe even the one that looks too hard.

The upper floor of the reading area had a vietnamese corner, and books from Indian languages, a few because the rest was buried beneath.

We headed to the children’s library, where almost none of us actually touched the books. Shame I know. But the couches seemed cushiony and extremely comfortable, so as soon as our backsides touched them , we breathed a sigh of relief.

A minute or so later, we headed out, passed the under construction main building of the national library, the very one that is rumored to have a ghost, and headed to the place where the books are repaired. Yellow pages deacidified to make them white again, or maybe books put into fumigation chambers to clear them of the book worms, not the humans who like to read but the real worms.

The place was stuffy so some of us ducked behind machines, stools and tables to make ourselves a path to the demonstrations.

At the end in repair house, we ended up at the aging chamber. Now, if you put yourselves or the books in the chamber you won’t become aged.

It’s like you put a book in there, set the timer… say, 15 mins= 1year, then after 15 mins you can see how the book would look in a year, considering the fact the conditions in which it is today remains constant.

The ways in which science has advanced, never ceases to amaze me.

All this while we were guessing which bookshop would ma’am, be taking us to. After 15 mins of travelling, towards the Indian museum, on the bus while stuffing our faces, we started walking towards the well anticipated shop of books. Walking up the stairs of a building, we first noticed a motel with a really strange name, and next to it was a doorway with a jewish symbol. No the proprietor of the bookshop was not jewish, he was a plain bengali, who spoke really well for someone who had never finished high school.

The bookshop had been in his family for generations. It was small. Put stacked from top to bottom with books. There were pile of books on the floor too… we could hardly walk, let alone walk, move our feet without the fear of tripping over a pile of books.  While the proprietor told his story, sorry but I wasn’t really paying attention because the books had bewitched me. Mythology, mystery, hmmm…. 2018 prediction books each specialized for a particular zodiac sign, tea leaves reading, Dan Brown’s Origin, Magnus Chase’s third book. This place had everything.

The book of secrets specially made for the proprietor of the books shop. It had quotes, facts about books, strangely they were universal truths that we often choose to ignore, all arranged in the form of calligrams and word plays.

Next comes the best part of the trip -- the Graveyard. Dark and mysterious. Tall tombs with canopies, one of which was trampled by a friend of mine, who thought it was a resting place in the middle of nowhere. Essentially she was correct but the fact that she missed out that it was the resting place of the dead.

Son of Charles Dickens, Derozario, Wife of Governor General Cornwallis, William Jones, Colonel Kyd, Cleveland, Stuart, and so many other people whose names I can’t recollect, had their graves amongst the hundred other people buried there. I guess this is what makes historically important, but the fact that this is a graveyard without a church and even a crypt makes it special. It is the South Park Street cemetery, the place where the only grave of the original North Park Street Cemetery was relocated to.

Initially, graves were located haphazardly, later was organised… this has resulted in the graveyard being congested in certain places and not so in others.  Oh wait guess what the original North Park Street Cemetery was across the road, below the Assembly of God Church School, and Mercy Hospital. Shocking right? I just hope that there is a underground path between the two Cemeteries.

My best friend and I took turns to behave like we were in a trance subconsciously that too. She would walk down random paths all of a sudden and not respond to any of our calls. At one point of time I was really worried, because after all she has been in my life for the past five years, and I can hardly imagine life without her. I had a laughing fit once which scared my other friends. I was laughing because we were in the middle of well graves, and in the mud, and there was no way out without hitting the mud. How had we ended up there? Well simple answer, we followed Dhriti and I added my own excursion to it. If you were out of the graveyard you would be laughing too.. But if you were standing on the real path, you would have been spooked out for real!

Well beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  But in the graveyard, beauty was everywhere. Dead beautiful.

Did I get shivers down my spine? No, I didn’t though I do get weirded out by horror movies, this was what was alluring, and elegant.

An eclectic mix of tombs, cenotaphs, and mausoleums, the graveyard has European Gothic, Classic Antiquity, to Indo-Saracenic styles of architecture, jumbled up in a maze of obelisks, cairns, urns, and sarcophagi.

Apart from these the wet mud, the trees and the flowers, nature in the middle of the city, in all its glory is something none of us can resist. The best thing, not a sound of the outside world could be heard inside of the graveyard.

In all the time I spent there, I found peace, and yet there is nothing wrong with praying for the souls well keeping, and wishing them good luck in the adventure beyond that they might be on. The rule of Karma is that whatever you do, comes back to you, so, maybe wishing them luck might result in someone else wishing us luck on our next adventure, and who knows what we might come across!

Subhanjali Saraswati