Cloud 9 Minus One

When my husband lay critically ill in hospital a few months ago, and the prognosis was dire, the only solace I got was from reading an astonishingly good book on Delhi, my native city. The book took me away from my immediate, horrible reality, it spoke to me in a dear tongue and told me that there’s more to life than, well, life. When I read it, I felt that no matter what happened, at the end of the day there was another good book waiting to be read, and that as long as there were books, there was hope, there was humanity. I tided over the prolonged period of hospitalisation by immersing myself into one book after another. We were living away from home, and I would make special trips to my place to take back a few more books from my shelves, to devour them in the waiting room of the Breach Candy ICU.
People wondered at my composure and steady spirits during the ordeal. There were a number of reasons for this, and I won’t go into them here, but a big factor in my life was the fact that each day I was discovering a fresh miracle, the miracle of a well-written word.
Now I’m reading Lolita, the well-known story of a paedophile, and the book is moving me in ways that I can’t decipher. It is telling me of the enormity of the world, the vastness of the human spirit, which cannot be encapsulated by one’s own petty experiences. It is taking me beyond my immediate, small, indifferent world to a hugeness that is certainly putting my life into perspective.
It is unfashionable to read books these days. But I know that without literature, the human wouldn’t exist. It is the narration of the human spirit that allows us to go beyond ourselves into uncharted waters.