"Whoever has any of my books, RETURN IT. Includes - Complete collection of short stories by Saki, Franny and Zooey, Ayn Rand, M.P. Jain on Constitutional Law and so on. PLEASE RETURN IT!!!!!"
This was a friend's status message on G-talk. I felt sad for her, I felt sad about my plight, again. Whenever books are mentioned, a certain kind of venom begins to flow in my blood, a vengeful me shapes up. And it is because, it is so easy for people to just stamp all over your library, pick up the books they want and waltz away into a never-ending oblivion. It's pathetic, really.
As a kid, I remember having a lot of baby books. Those Infantile, hard-cover and lots-of-cartoons books. Best of the lot, ones my mom and dad would pick up from every country they’d visit. I read them as a kid; I kept them as a growing child. They were stolen by my playmate. Did I use the word “stolen”? Yes, I meant to. I was in 3rd Grade I remember, and one fine day I am unable to see that big pile of books in my room. The next minute, I see, Apple[the girl] sitting on her verandah and placing tick marks on some books, I went to ask her if she wanted to play and she was like, No I am correcting MY books that MY CHACHA got me. Hell, your books? And Chacha, who was she kidding. Sure if her Chacha gave her MY books. I haven’t seen her in a long time. We moved to another place by the time I was in fourth grade. To this day, I have dreams of threatening to kill her if she doesn’t return my books back. I wonder which “raddhiwala”, her mom gave away the books to.
Of course lessons like these are not learnt so well by a person like me. I am a people-pleaser. So over the years I have lost many an expensive book. Notably are a huge collection of Maugham and Wodehouse, and Kafka. I keep reminding them to return my books, but all I get to hear in return are muffled hmms and ummms. GIVE THEM BACK. GIVE THEM BACK.
Books and book owners are not to be messed with. Trust me, because if I do not get my books back, I will do what the law forbids me to. Kill. So whenever I see a status message like that, it brings back memories of all the beautiful books I have lost. With those memories springs up anger and resentment. If it’s not yours, it’s not a collection. I don’t know what these people who borrow wish to achieve by not returning! Gah.
Books, you’ve been buying from the money you saved from your itsy-bitsy pocket-money. Books you bought when you were happy, books you bought when you were sad, books you bought when you were bored. Books you were gifted. Books you bought as a gift but couldn’t let go of and kept them with you! Books to remember your childhood by, books with red ink tick marks on them. Books with taped front pages and covers, books you’d hide from your parents. These are all those things that books stand for me.
Those musty old books are precious to me. The smell of books is like perfume to me. On lonely nights it is my cure to drown into them. I love seeing lose colourful covers lined up in my library, I feel like a mother.
So if you’re reading this, OH BORROWER’s, please return my books.
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