Hi! I like you very much already. You're reading. That's a good sign. Because books are seeds you plant in your head. They grow into huge trees, and if you read enough books, eventually, you have a forest through which you can walk. And the trees will bear fruit, fruit you have never seen before, because they will be ideas you have thought up yourself.
And ideas? Real ideas? Original ideas? They are the most important thing you can have.
Sane Guruji's Shyamchi Aai is a great seed to plant. You are a lucky young person because you're reading it in a good translation. I read a bad translation and I wanted to give up by about page 25. I wasn't reading Marathi then. I could but I wasn't going to read it in Marathi when it had been translated into English. (I was a lazy bounder. There. I've said it.) This is a big mistake. If you can read Marathi, put this book down and go read the Marathi original. But if you can't, never mind. The number of languages you can read in will always be smaller than the number of languages you can't read in and so we have translation. But good translation is a rare thing and this is a great translation.
How do I know?
I read it through in one night. And I discovered an entirely new book.
Okay, you can argue that I am another person now and therefore this is a new book. (This is a good reason to reread books. Because when you change, the book you're reading changes.) But it is also because a new translation is a new book and a good translation makes a world of difference.
So, where was I?
Right. I was reading some other translation of Shyamchi Aai and got quite tired. But someone had told me that it was an important book, a classic and I was the kind of young twit who liked to go about reading the classics. Someone else told me that I would understand a lot about how we think about women and how we think about mothers if I read this book. I had just seen Mother India-where a mother picks up a gun and . . . Nah, if you haven't seen it, I won't spoil it for you.
This time I discovered that Shyamchi Aai begins with a most interesting conversation about the nature of memory and how we think about ourselves. This is an odd thing for young men to be discussing, but here's the thing: Shyamchi Aai is a novel of ideas. Each night, the young men sit and talk. They listen as Shyam tells them an episode from his life.
Each of these conversations is a seed and this means that you don't just get one idea, you get a whole granary of them. Shyam says: 'We are proud of our religion but our deeds turn our words into a joke. He warns us that words can hurt. And on a much more homely level, his mother recommends that we ask before taking flowers from other people's gardens for our pooja!
You may not agree with many of these ideas. Sure. That's part of the delight of a novel of ideas. But I'd say you should write your own conversation. Talk back to Shyam, discuss it with him. Tell him why he's wrong. And as you're writing, another little bit of magic will happen. Your ideas will become clearer to yourself You think this is odd?
Think about the idea of an idea. It's just a little energy, some neurons in your head firing and carrying electrical messages about your busy busy brain. Some of this is memory, some of this is invention, some of this is desire. You sit up and you think: Oh my goodness, oh my gosh, if this were a comic book, someone should draw a light bulb above my head.
Someone asks you: What are you thinking about?
You say: I was thinking ...
And as you begin to tell that person, the idea loses shape. You want to say: No, listen wait, let me also tell you the colour of this and the feeling and the way it was in my head, so wonderful and alive . . .
Yes, turning the idea into words is a difficult thing.
So you love books?
Would you copy out a book? Shyam does. He does it for the love of God because he wants to learn a prayer and he hasn't got a copy of the prayer. So he borrows the book from a neighbour, a boastful chap, and writes out the book. But then Shyam's home, Sane Guruji tells us, is full of books that have been copied out.
How much do you love books? Would you love them enough to copy one out and try to make sure there are no ink stains and no mistakes? Then there is this lovely moment where Shyam's mother looks at his work and tells him to ask the cloth merchant for a label that depicts the deity so that he can stick it on the cover.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
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