WHEN the book enters its last phases or chapters or pages, it starts giving signals that the rendezvous is soon to end. The book may be of fiction or poetry or essays or a non-fiction technical treatise, but when one enters its last stages, one starts feeling a sense of sadness that a friend will soon depart. That is truly a sad feeling, no matter the quality of the book. Of course, when one chooses a book, one has reason to believe that it is good. So, when the book nears its end, one starts getting lonely feeling -- that a good company will now be a matter of past. Of course, the loud-thinker often revisits his books -- several times in some cases, so much so that he starts remembering in full detail chapters and pages and lines and sentences in complete sequence ...! (Aren’t there people who see a movie several times!). Yet, the sense of sadness is profound each time the book -- even under a repeat reading -- enters its last stages. The loud-thinker does not want that to happen. So, he tries to linger over pages as long as possible.

 

But that idea does not work well and the book rushes to its final line. And then a profound sadness comes over, clouds the mind, leaves a haze before misty eyes, leaves the palms wet with slight sweat. Of course, that sadness has a poetic value of its own, its own syntax, its own meter, its own rhythm, its own lilt. No matter all that, one still does not want to keep the book aside. Of course, the loud-thinker knows that this is madness. Yet, for him, it is an endearing madness with an engulfing sadness. When he started reading the Marathi book Geet Ramayan when he was barely ten years old, the loud-thinker had the advantage of having heard many of those songs on the radio (since there was no television in those good-old- wonderful days).

 

Yet, those poetic expressions from Ga Dee Madgulkar (Anna, for everybody in Maharas- htra) in print were very endearing. As the book Geet Ramayan neared its end, it also marked the end of Lord Ram’s story, so to say. The loud-thinker (then a little child) remembers the profound sadness he felt when he realised that he would no longer be having the book’s company. Almost every book gives a similar experience. But there are a few whose companionship has an altogether different flair and flavour and fervour and flourish and finish and fullness and flow and feverish attraction ...! Oh! The loud-thinker is fortunate to be in the thick of thick and thin books of all shapes and sizes and states in many languages including Sanskrit -- in good number every month. Thus, he has so many personae in literary form for company. And his experience is that every friend between covers gives him the same, intimate experience of togetherness. One book is over and the next one comes in, but the warmth of the company is similarly endearing and metaphorically enduring. That is how things are with books !!!