Our family was renowned as the bookish family of the town. We had a bookstore in the main market. My grandfather, my father and my uncle, all of those three men of the house built the bookstore. But after my father got his job and my grandfather became old, they couldn’t go to the store daily. From then, the bookstore was run by my uncle mainly, but in the evening, my father and grandfather also joined him most days.

Dadu and Baba loved reading books. They were avid readers. Many times, they used to borrow books from the town library and read them by sharing them on a weekly basis.

I heard from Baba that many years ago, our family also ran a small publishing house. One day, while selling the reference books of ninth and tenth standard students, Dadu read some of them and instantly disliked their approaches. Dadu was a scholarly writer, and thus, he didn’t like the writing style of the Bengali and English reference books. Then, he proposed writing reference books and selling them to students.

As soon as the idea clicked, his sons joined him to fulfill his mission and all of them started the procedure of printing the reference books authored by my grandfather. Once they released those books in the market, they started getting sold like hotcakes!

But unfortunately, they had to shut it down soon and for some reason, they never started a publishing house again. I hope someday I will be able to restart their unfinished dreams of building and running a successful publishing house.

We had a bookstore, we had a small publishing house, and we also had a little library in our house.

The library was mainly a small room full of books. There were many bookshelves; some of them were open and some of them were closed, but all of them were stuffed with books.

That library was one of my favorite places in the house. I would pay a visit very often there and I wondered how big was the world of books! Though it was a small room, for me, it seemed bigger than any other room in our house as it was full of books! Wherever I turned my eyes, I saw only books. Most of them were from the ancient age (that seemed to me at that time) because they were full of dust and whenever I opened them, I could only see the yellowish, half-torn, and wrinkled pages inside, hardly to be able to read the words printed.

But I loved the smell of those old books.

“How many books do we have?” I often asked my grandfather. He always smiled and told me to count them myself. I started counting them…one, two, three, four, then five, then six, then seven, eight, nine…then I left counting because I always found something interesting when I reached the tenth book.

I would grab that book, return to my room, and start reading it to finish it at the earliest.

The next day, my grandfather used to ask me how was the book that I read the previous day. If I had finished reading it, I would tell him about my experience; if not, I would ask him to wait for one day or two. He used to smile and nod his head, saying “Acha, besh”, (okay, fine), he returned to his room.

But there was a strict rule in picking my reads from our home library. Every time I wanted to read a new book, it had to be scrutinized by Dadu and he would hand over the book only if he was satisfied with its content. And thus, I never read a book without Dadu’s permission.

In our home library, many books were the treasured collection of my grandfather. Those books were based on patriotism or national freedom movement or classics written by renowned Bengali authors. But Dadu never wanted me to read anything other than children’s books or books that were meant to convey some instances of profound joy to a child.

A big part of my reading experience consisted of Bengali books. Since we had a good collection of Bengali books in our house, it was quite obvious for the little girl to pick her favorite read from the library and start her adventure with the book of the day.

As I learned how to write from my grandfather, I also learned the art of reading from him.

Dadu taught me how to read a book with all our senses, and he was very careful in his teaching as he did it skillfully. He taught me word by word, how to imagine something in the canvas of the heart, how to connect to the writer and the characters of the book, and how to transcend myself to the world of the book I was reading so I could experience everything in the literary plane.

When I read the books from our little library, sometimes I cried, sometimes I smiled, sometimes I wondered about my existence, and sometimes I felt motivated knowing the History of the Indian Freedom Movement. Sometimes I felt as if I was there in the story as a character, and sometimes I wondered if I could get a chance to write the story in some other way.

Sometimes I felt we were nothing but stories.

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Books have been my best friends since childhood, for they never left me alone to be lost in the crowd – the crowd of known, unknown, little-known, known-yet-unknown, and unknown-yet-known people.

Books always won my trust.

My love for books was born out of a never-ending thirst to know more and more. I was introduced to the world of books by my father, my uncle, and my grandfather. That little girl fell in love with books instantly when she received her very first book on her hands.

It was love at first sight, and that little girl wanted to have more and more sights of books. I loved to see myself immersed in the pool of books. When I had books, books, and books around me, it felt like the best place on earth. I loved to engross myself in the book I was reading so that nobody could find me in the world, and I, immersing my head inside the book, would escape from this worldly chaos for some time.

As time passed, that little library gradually disappeared somewhere and I could not reach there ever again. Now, I am building my own library in our house, and, every time I go upstairs, open the bookshelf, and search for a book to read, I find that little girl who used to forget her count when she reached the tenth book.

Maybe she never grew up for the child decided to live in her forever as the little curious reader.

(This post is part of the Bookish League blog hop hosted by Bohemian Bibliophile.)

(This post is also part of the Blogchatter Blog Hop themed on ‘Childhood’.)