Of fathers & sons (& books)

This has been almost six years in the making. I have started and stopped it several times, always convinced that there is something I want to express, but never quite being able to capture it words, the feeling remaining elusive and always just out of reach. There was also the nagging doubt that about its value, but it does seem like the only way I will get it out of my system is to just go for it. The narrator of Somerset Maugham’s short story Salvatore opens with the line, “I wonder if I can do it.” Turns out that what he is wondering about is whether he can write an interesting story about an ordinary man with no remarkable attributes. I always felt that Maugham had failed in his attempt, but I am hoping for better results from essentially taking on a similar challenge here.

It was the Fall of 2014 and I had driven my parents (who were visiting from India) to spend a weekend in Tucson with my niece who was in school at the University of Arizona. One of the few “attractions” that was open at 10 pm on a Saturday evening was the main university library and given that both my father and I loved to visit libraries (& bookshops), we decided to pop in for a bit. My general modus operandi is to head for the familiar authors (it takes a lot for me to try a new author) or favorite topics, pull a few books from the shelves and then find a chair to peruse them. As Wodehouse put it in another memorable turn of phrase, I would make like a butterfly, “flitting from flower to flower, sipping.” I decided that this time would be different. For some reason, a feeling of melancholy had swept over me as I surveyed the rows and rows of shelves, in the almost complete silence of a library floor that was largely deserted, save the four of us. Even writing a simple blog is hard enough for me and here were hundreds upon hundreds of books, that had been slaved upon by their respective authors, but would likely never be read by anybody but the author and his or her editor. I was determined to express at least a token solidarity.

I walked down the central aisle without looking at the row indices and at random, turned into one of the rows and equally at random, reached out and picked a book from one of the shelves. The book was a hardcover that was lacking its dust jacket. This meant that I was without all the usual clues I relied on to get an early bead on a book — synopsis of the book, comments from reviewers, perhaps even a bio of the author. Indeed, I couldn’t even tell if it was fiction or nonfiction. Undeterred, I cracked open the cover (I may well have been the first person to have done so, given how stiff it was) and gave it my full attention. The first thing I learned was the title — Lost Men and the name of the author — Brian Leung. Neither helped. I had never heard of Brian Leung and the title didn’t ring any bells either. The first chapter seemed to be the account of a small boy visiting his aunt, but I could glean very little context — I could place neither the time nor place in which the events were taking place. However, the writing was interesting and I kept reading and when it came time to leave the library, I had my niece check the book out for me.

There was a time when I would read an entire book in one sitting — typically staying up late into the night. I thought I would do the same here since we were departing Tucson the next day and I couldn’t take the book with me. But, I stopped after getting through about half the book, with consideration for the seven hour drive back to San Diego that awaited me. The book was intriguing enough that I still wanted to finish it. I located it in one of the branches of our public library and proceeded to borrow it. My father had noticed all of these — the reading late into the night in Tucson and then searching for and finding the book in San Diego — and asked me a few times about it. I had given my usual non sequitor responses.

The “Lost Men” of the title turned out to be a father and son, with most of the story told from the son’s perspective (it shifts rather abruptly to the father’s perspective for one brief chapter towards the end). The father is Chinese while the mother was white. After her premature death (the cause of which may be part of the strain that is between father and son), the father leaves the son with his wife’s family and is only a sporadic presence in his life. Now the son is a twenty-something and the father has returned to take him on a long-promised trip to China. The son is obviously resentful about the long absence of the father, but there are other secrets that they are withholding from each other. They both sense it, but almost seem powerless to do anything about it. Even while being a story that was uniquely that of the two protagonists, it was at once a universal one. The feeling of disappointing and being disappointed by a parent or child (& vice versa) is all too common. Compounded only by an almost physical ennui that creeps in as we despair to find just the words to convey what we must. I was no stranger to this. As with any novel, the “Lost Men” achieve a certain measure of catharsis towards the end, but this only put a finer point on the feeling that the story had brought up in me. Was I to attempt a grand gesture of my own? What would it be? It wasn’t like my father and I had any “big” issues or secrets that we were holding on to. We had simply let things drift and the guilt from making my move to America permanent made everything else inconsequential and seemingly without any real resolution.

And then something unexpected — my father who had never read single novel in his life (he preferred non-fiction exclusively), picked up the book and started reading it himself. I am still not sure why he did so — was it a curiosity to see what was it about this book that had so captured his son’s attention? Perhaps reading the same book would give him some insight into his son? I will never know, because we didn’t really discuss it much after he had finished the book and now, almost 6 years later, I dare say that he has forgotten all about it. But, in that moment, I had a sensation of a connection with him that I cannot not fully capture in words. But even today, it is a feeling that refuses to let go of me.

That a book could be a strand that connected us, albeit indirectly, should not have been as surprising as it seemed to be at first glance. Growing up in a lower middle class family in India, we had very little money for anything beyond the essentials. Debt of any kind is anathema to my father and we lived strictly within the means of the fixed income from his government job. There were a bunch of books at home, but they were some obscure titles and I don’t think I ever saw my father read any of them. But, for some reason, he fully encouraged my reading habit. Buying new books was out of the question. Instead, the two of us would go scouring the many used book stores in Bangalore and come back with books whose pages were often only held together with a rubber band. My father would then get them bound in the printing press that was part of his office. The actual book covers were almost never there of course and I ended up with a significant collection of books that were bound in covers with random patterns and sans any text. I was the only one who knew what each book was.

What was equally unique about my father’s support for my reading habit is that he was completely non-judgmental about what I was reading. One of my favorite authors in those days was James Hadley Chase (an American author who is largely forgotten now), whose books were easily identifiable by its cover art — always a skimpily clad woman, often posing with a gun. They were generally considered ‘unsuitable’ for kids, but I never got a question about them. Of course, the books featured very little in terms of sex or even suggestive dialog and were instead crime novels that spanned a wide gamut of genres (some pedestrian, but some remarkably well plotted). My father simply had no input on my consumption — he had read some books in his native tongue of Malayalam, but English was limited to the daily newspaper and official use. This also meant that our interaction was limited to the efforts he put in to get me books, but nothing beyond that — we never discussed anything I was reading.

This prompts me to make a small detour here — it’s not totally irrelevant, I promise. I had been a voracious reader since my elementary school days, but entering high school, my diet was still decidedly low-brow. Starting with the ever popular Enid Blyton (probably getting through at least 500 of her 700+ books), I had worked my way through the entire canon of the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Erle Stanley Gardner (the Perry Mason books), Agatha Christie, Alistair Maclean, Robert Ludlum, and a bunch of other lesser lights, that are now lost to the mists of time. The theme is obvious — easy reading thriller and crime stories. The closest I came to bucking the trend was probably with Maclean’s HMS Ulysses. It’s rare in life to identify the precise moment when something changes, irrevocably, but my literary “awakening” was one such. One of my cousins (who is much older than me) was visiting us and as he was leaving, gifted me a copy of Maclean’s Partisans. Even as I was suffused with the thrill of owning a new book from a favorite author, his next words snapped me out of it very quickly (and remain seared in memory to this day) — “You know, you should start reading more serious books.” Boy, that stung. Before that, I had had a rather high opinion of my reading habits — the variety of authors I read and the number of books I got through. But the scales dropped after that comment (which I almost immediately realized was right on point) and I embarked on my discovery of the “better” books. The aforementioned Maugham was one of the first new entrants to my world and his Of Human Bondage remains one of my all time favorite books. Graham Greene had me in thrall of his powerful writing while Wodehouse had me rolling around, convulsed with laughter while simultaneously savoring his delicious turns of phrase (and reaching for the dictionary). The state subsidy of the now extinct USSR made the Russian authors rather affordable — surely there are others who recall the “Mir Publishers” — and I was soon in the world of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. It’s been at least thirty-five years since I read Anna Karenina, but I can still feel it’s emotional tug. It would be all too easy to go on and on about it, but this is a journey that has brought me so much pleasure and rewards that its signposts merit their own blog post. Perhaps it was inevitable that my reading tastes would mature beyond that of my elementary and middle school years, but it would likely have taken longer and would certainly have been a lot more gradual.

After I got to the US and books suddenly became much more affordable, my rapidly maturing and now, much more expansive, tastes led to the creation of a pretty decent library of my own — stocked by more nonfiction than fiction (which I continued to be a big consumer of). I love to buy books and very quickly, I reached the point where acquiring the book became more important than actually reading it. The percentage of my books that I had actually read fell at a precipitous rate. I would feel vague pangs of guilt about this, until I chanced upon this write-up that contained a quote from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which uses the Italian author Umberto Eco and his collection of 30,000+ books to illustrate the point about the “anti-library”. Taleb goes on, “Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.” The Japanese even have a term for it — Tsundoku — or the act of “leaving a book unread after buying it, typically on a pile with other unread books.” I was clearly a past master of tsundoku.

What this amounted to is that my father had plenty to catch his interest during the several extended visits he made with us in San Diego. He would start upon many a book from my collection, but not quite get through any of them. After every visit, I would find numerous books — always nonfiction — stowed back into my bookshelves with bookmarks inserted. He would often ask me why I bought a particular book or how I had learned about a particular author or subject. For somebody who had always lived on a strict budget (even when he could afford not to, somewhat ironically, in his later years) the idea that a person would just buy a book (or ten) on a mere whim was not easy to comprehend. But nevertheless, I sensed a small amount of pride in him, that his son had the exposure and desire to invest in these books. That realization, in turn, had me looking forward to sharing my new acquisitions with him on his next visit. While not dwelling on the fact that he wouldn’t actually finish any of them.

Which is what made my father’s (one and only) foray into fiction — in the form of Lost Men all the more remarkable. For, he actually finished it. It still astonishes me that a book that I picked up completely at random turned out to have so much resonance and for it to be the just the right one at that point in time. Both of us reading the book was tantamount to vicariously having the same dialog as the father and son in the book, albeit in tone and not in substance. Even today, that feels like a minor milestone.

We spend much of our life waiting for the “big” events and feeling the pressure to make dramatic flourishes. Maybe, just maybe, we should be casting our gaze much closer — at those seemingly lightweight and inconsequential experiences that, in fact, pack a sizable punch.

The story does come full circle — at least in a small measure — and once again, Tucson has a role to play. My own sons are now 17 and 14 and I have tried hard to encourage their reading habits, with mixed success. The allure of video games, Instagram, and YouTube are often much stronger than that of books. But, ever so gradually, they are both expanding their reading tastes and my younger one especially, has shown an interest in branching out. A few weeks ago, he picked up one my many unread books at random and started reading it. This one was In the Woods by somebody called Tana French and I had purchased it many years ago from a used bookstore in Tucson — pretty much on a whim. I had never started the book and really had no idea what the book was about. Soon after he started on it, Abhi declared the book to be “very interesting” and would periodically comment to me about how much he was enjoying it. As soon as he finished it, he asked if he could get the “next book in the series.” A series? Really? I looked it up and sure enough, it turns out that the book I had bought was the first one of a rather acclaimed series by a relatively new author (Tana French) from Ireland. A boxed set was on offer and I quickly placed the order. After it arrived and Abhi had started on the second book in the series (The Likeness), I picked up the first one (In the Woods) — my interest having been piqued mostly by Abhi’s obvious enjoyment of it. I realized, with just a slight hint of wistfulness, that I was now taking reading recommendations from my sons. On a little side note, now that we had two copies of the first book, Arjun also started on it and we are in a race to see who can finish it first and, indeed, if we can get there before Abhi finishes his book.

If a person is defined by their habits, I most certainly am with my reading one. There are mighty tomes devoted to the analysis of the power of reading, but for me it simply comes down to this — reading is a uniquely human activity that challenges and grows your imagination. It’s not coincidence that an Einstein poster has hung in my room for almost thirty years now — with the quote, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” I also realize that despite all the digressions, this is a long overdue tribute to my father for having set me on this path. And that feels right too.