When books matter, and nothing else,
When words matter, of a tempting tale...
Stealthily reading a story
Underneath my Chemistry book...
I forget for a moment
I am here or over the moon...

The very smell of books resonates with my different facets of imagination with an array of diverse memories of olfactory experiences, I have accumulated over a period of time...The smell of old ones makes me ruminate about the people who might have read those books...turned those pages which make some of them crumpled from the edges, some even torn in the shape of a triangle. The new ones have some other weird tales to narrate..the hands they had passed through till they have reached the newly formed bibliophile...
My initiation as a bibliophile started around the time when I was in the fifth grade...I dreamt of having a library of my own, I being the sole proprietor of it ....a sort of haven in a world of crude realism.
I would turn the pages of a book with utmost delicacy and care...I have a strong distaste for folded and crushed pages...somehow they reflect the unbridled attention the reader paid to the book while devouring their pages.
Books are to be savored and respected...they disperse the knowledge and creativity of the writer who has taken utmost pain and diligence in assembling his ideas in those pages.
Books transport me to the world of the writer and his characters....a temporary suspension of realism; woven out of the grey matter of the genius. They goad me to think and envisage the story in my ever inquisitive and restive mind and create an interpretation of my own---very distinctive and self-contained.
I would accumulate all the money gifted to me on various occasions and hop on to a book store to buy books with the unadulterated enthusiasm of a child when he gets hold of a new toy.
It's utterly a cumbersome effort on the part of the person who has accompanied me to the book store, to take me out of that place...Later on, I often feel pity for that person and sometimes grateful as well that he or she has tolerated my insanity for that period of time.
Books sustain me, satiate me and dispel an inner calmness of the mind for quite an impressionable length of time.
To cut the long story short----
Mounds of books, strewn all around,
Sitting in the middle of nowhere -
The aperture of my eyes refuse to shut
It's already twelve o'clock...
By Nandini Sengupta
@metaphors_of_life
Beautifully delineated. I felt every bit of it. Reading in peace is a distant reality now 😔
Excellent