Most booklovers have dusty libraries where silverfish nestle and bookworms make perfect round holes in precious pages that would have been saved if it weren't for the insatiable greed to collect outweighing the responsibility to care for the books brought home.
Naturally where there is a booklover, there is a mother or a wife who itches to clean the shelves, who nags the bibliophile for being eccentric and inevitably becomes the target of bitter chiding if they happen to do the biggest wrong a booklover cannot bring himself/herself to forgive - cleaning the shelves and re-arranging the books (gasp)!
Yesterday I decided to clean up one of Aaman's five libraries housed in a room which actually was supposed to be a puja room but had been hijacked by his evil intent to horde his collection and protect it from fellow booklovers.
There was a heavy steel Godrej lock on the door instead of a 'no trespassing' sign; the warning was left unsaid but understood by our helpers and me. Despite knowing the dire consequences that would await my actions I decided to cross the line and sell most of his paper backs to (ahem) the Kabariwala.
And who could blame me? Everyday he would take books out of his room, leave them lying around and show them off like a woman does her diamonds at a kitty party only to conveniently forget about the shabby, untidy piles of books that would be left all over the house with me picking up after him when he'd leave for work.
The cycle continued - he'd keep taking them out and I'd keep putting them back without really going through them. Don't get me wrong, I love books but not the way Aaman does. He stops at every little dinky book shop, reads four books at a time and even though he is blind as a bat currently (his only pair of glasses are broken), he continues to hold a book close his nose and read.
With a passion like that it would obviously be a violation, a breach of trust, the ultimate betrayal to sell his books to a man who would make wrapping paper out of the precious words, but I had enough.
The room was dingy, dusty with books sprawled around, innumerable CDs left in too many stacks to be accounted, and worst of all he still had outdated cassettes lying around.
I couldn't take it anymore. We had been out of the country for five years and like the house, his libraries were in dismal condition and needed to be salvaged.
The cleaning brigade consisting of three helpers and me attacked the room with Lysol, buckets of water, dusting cloths and were nearly shooed off by sneezes and the inability to breathe as the room was carpeted with dust.
As we worked through the books, we realized that there were so many books that we had to make a human chain to pass the books out. Initially I started to browse through the books but there were so many that we decided to do first things first - get the damned books out of the room! It took us an hour to clear the room of the books, another half an hour with the CDs, and the cassettes were merely dumped in buckets and piled in the garage.
Since I was at the beginning of the line I did not realize how many books were thrown out into the porch and was shocked to see the five foot piles of books that greeted me.
My heart sank. How was I supposed to separate the valuable books from the useless ones, clean the room up and then sell the left over books to the Kabariwala before Aaman came home in the evening?
The helpers refused to sit down with me and browse through the books as they were well aware of my evil intentions.
"Aaman Baba ka kettab hum nahi sell karege. Hume ghar se nekal dege! was their reaction and they merely cleaned up the room and departed for their afternoon siesta.
I found myself going through a rare leather bound classic that hadn't fallen prey to silverfish, old unknown lewd covered paperbacks, magazines and hardbound coffee table books.
So many books, which to sell and which to keep? I found myself reading their backs, finding the plots interesting despite the tattered conditions of the books.
The collection was as old as Aaman himself, ranging from kindergarten books with his names scribbled in a childish handwriting to Playboy magazines to Classics to all kinds of books on music, quiz, you name it and it was such a wonderful collection of books that I was easily dissuaded of my original intentions.
I found myself telling the helpers to dust the books and put them in clean piles. I began to put his books in the right order, in categories and found myself enjoying the activity that started off as a chore but then became a pleasurable deed.
A coincidence took place that had me in splits for agood five minutes in that silent dusty room. I had put a book called One Virginity on the shelf and the next book that somehow landed up right next to it was – Two Virgins.
Now the chance of such a thing happening was too fantastic for me to even consider.
The afternoon passed fast with us re-arranging his library. Not a paper was thrown away and by the time Aaman returned, the library smelled of flowers, the late afternoon sun streamed through the newly cleaned window panes and glimmered on his complete leather bound collection of Alexandre Dumas.
We were proud of our accomplishment and while Aaman was proud of my efforts , yet he remained blissfully unaware of how close he had come to losing his treasure trove had not his wife been a booklover herself.
The post isnt about the hot babe but about the non existent thong that she is wearing. I don't like thongs, its like walking around with a 24/7 wedgie. Its irritating especially when one is wearing jeans. That little strip that holds the panty together tends to pull up between the butt cheeks and i'd be held hostage by a wedged undie and think - Pull the damn thing out but how? i cant pull out in public but damn it! I can't take it anymore.
