Déjà vu is for real, and it happened this morning in the metro.
Reading books in public these days evoke curious reactions. I am talking about my morning metro travels which take all of thirty minutes. You take trouble and come early (at times miss a train to be in front of the queue) so you get the comfortable seat, settle down and take out your reading glass along with the book. Suddenly there’s an eerie silence for a couple of seconds. Words are swallowed or cut in half, eyes bulge and get back in the socket, mouths open unwarrantedly and forget to close, and at the third second, it is back to the cacophonic normal.
Some of
them very carefully (and unsuccessfully) try to ignore you. Some show interest
in the book title bending their body across to read it, some flash the phone out
at you and start scanning through the screen as to tell you ‘See, I am better
occupied’ and some others look at you with compassion as if to say, ‘if only
you had a smartphone…’
I remember
the good old days when you settled down on the luggage berths of the passenger
trains on a regular basis on your way back from college with a book in hand. It
was normal then. People hardly noticed you unless a creepy friend landed up on
the berth to have a discussion on a girl he missed proposing to or an uncle
wanted to park his luggage and I extended some help in lifting it up.
But one instance
when someone noticed me (so I thought) reading a book sitting on the luggage
berth left a sweet nothingness until I got down from the berth before the train
reached my station. I was reading ‘The Chronicle of a Death Foretold’ by Garcia
Marqeuz and was lost in Santiago Nasar’s plight and the Vicario brothers’ anger.
An admiring gaze caught the corner of my eye and the corner invited the whole
towards that colourful presence among the passengers lined out on the lower
berth. It was a beautiful girl in her early twenties (my age or so at that time.)
I read interest in her eyes and started casually looking down in between my
attempts to catch up with Nasar’s impending murder. It was not happening. My
interest in my own future over shadowed interest in the …death already
foretold. I smiled at her and she
smiled back. A good beginning, I thought. Folded the book, put it back in the
shoulder bag and I carefully climbed down, careful as not to stamp on any
elders’ knees (some of their abuses wouldn’t have done any good in the situation.)
As I stood wondering how to break the ice, she coolly started.
‘Can I see the book? I liked its cover.’
She clarified that she was a fine arts student travelling to Madras (Chennai
now) with her parents after a short vacation. I remember thrusting the book in
her hands and trying to make way for my shy exit. She passed it over the crowd
and the book reached me at last. I got down and walked past my immediate future.
Déjà vu is for real, and it happened this morning in the metro. The
book was a Malayalam novel by MT Vasudevan Nair. When you read Malayalam books
in public here in Dubai, you are sure to attract a few interested glances
toward you. And if you have a Malayali sitting next to you, you can see him
peeping through the corner of the eye and reading a few lines from the book in
his neighbour’s hand. We enjoy it. Maybe we are trying to identify the book from
those lines or seeing if we have read the book the other person is reading. Written
text is a weakness for us.
In the opposite row of seats there sat a seemingly North Indian youth,
clean shaven, chubby cheeks, torn jeans, yellow t-shirt and tattoos all over.
Like every other passenger, he was looking at his phone, watching something. But
then he was glancing at the book in my hand too in between. Once he took his
butt half away from his seat just to glare at the book cover. Got back and got
engaged in his gadget again. He started tapping with his shoes to rhythms of
some fast music on his phone. Lifted his eyes up to make sure I was there
still. Then he kept his phone away as if he had lost interest in the world
other than the book in my hand. I held it tight. What was there in a Malayalam book
that would interest a Hindi speaking boy?
‘Isn’t that MT? I have seen his movies’
Then he tried mispronouncing some of the names of MT’s movies. I smiled
at him and gave him a thumbs up like I always do in my Whatsapp chats, and sat
there in a cultural shock until the announcement said ‘abwab toghlaq’ (doors
are closing) at my station.
