My Father and Books

A poignant and philosophical reflection on a father-son relationship in 1970s Calcutta. This personal essay explores how a shared reverence for books became a silent language of love and connection amidst a childhood of scarcity.

7/27/2025

An open mind, I had once read—though where, I can no longer say with certainty, as the years and the pages blur into each other like the dust motes in late afternoon light—is the precondition to an open heart. I found the claim persuasive, if only partially, for I had already, in the slow and involuted theater of my childhood, observed the peculiar disjunction between the benevolence people professed and the selective, sometimes cruel, parsimony of their actions. Compassion, I learned early, was too often confined by the tight corsets of caste, prejudice, and petty ancestral anecdotes rehearsed into gospel.

These contradictions struck me first among the maternal relations of my early years, a parade of well-fed lips and tight fists, gliding like figures in a provincial tableau through the 1970s Calcutta of my upbringing—each cousin, aunt, and patriarch a study in the elaborate choreography of withholding. Charity, as it happened, rarely began at home. More often, it failed to begin at all.

My father—now no more, but whose memory glows like a dimming but stubborn wick in the vestibules of my recollection—seemed the lone exception to this parsimony, at least within the narrowed circumference of his own family. He was not a man of flourishes, and yet he lived with a kind of plainspoken constancy that now, in hindsight, approaches the tragic. He had been the fixed star in a constellation of shifting, threadbare fortunes—never absent, never spectacular, but always there. He belonged to a world in which responsibility was not a virtue to be praised, but a choreography to be enacted without comment.

When my grandfather returned from Rangoon, Burma, stripped of employment and future, my father was eleven. Eleven, and already called—not asked—to become the man of the house. Bread had to appear, and he conjured it in the anonymous alchemy of early labor, for two brothers, four sisters, and parents whose own capacities had been eroded by war and dislocation. That first performance—its rehearsals shadowed by fear and hunger—became, regrettably and irrevocably, the whole of his life. Even when his earnings later secured us a home not marked by want, the habits of scarcity—like dried ink on parchment—remained. We lived, always, as if we did not have enough, regardless of whether that was true. From rice to beans, every object was suspect, every desire a potential source of discord.

Possessions were not simply things but declarations—dangerous ones—and so I retreated, as a child, not from objects themselves but from the idea of wanting them. Desire came wrapped in guilt, and I learned not to want as a form of self-preservation. Even now, I carry a vestigial unease when afforded the possibility of ownership, a suspicion of the very comfort I might have earned. I do not actively suppress my desires; I simply lack the native impulse toward things, regarding them with a simultaneous affection, indifference, and faint contempt—as one might feel toward an old lover encountered by chance in a crowded tram.

What saved me—or rather, what allowed me to save myself in fragments—was imagination. Toys were rare, not because they were always unaffordable, but because their presence threatened to disturb the precarious emotional equilibrium of the household. A toy was not an object; it was a symbol, a signifier of indulgence, of inequality, of something someone else might go without. Books, however, occupied a curious and blessed neutrality. They bore no class scent in our house. They were, thanks to my father’s quiet bibliophilia, allowed—even welcomed—as emissaries from some larger, more generous world.

He himself did not read them. Not in the usual sense. I only ever saw him consulting the Gita, in fragments, as part of his daily ablutions, which were more about order and ritual than spiritual ecstasy. But he loved the idea of books, the architecture of them, the permanence they promised. It was my mother who taught me to read, patiently, in the warm afternoons before I was enrolled in school, and it was I who began devouring every scrap of printed matter within reach: comics, magazines, and battered novels whose pages smelled of other people’s rooms.

Soon I was not merely reading books, I was inhabiting them. Fiction became the truer reality, because it came with edges and punctuation. The world around me, with its contradictions and whispered resentments, felt less trustworthy. Dictionaries became my secret allies, tools that allowed me to escape the walls of my limited milieu. I mistrusted the classics, though, not for what they were, but for the company they kept—those who praised them too loudly at dinner parties where real hunger went unacknowledged.

And yet, in this solitary immersion, I found my father beside me again—not as a fellow reader, but as the guardian of the object itself. He was exacting with books: counting pages, smoothing jackets fashioned from yesterday’s Anandabazar, inspecting every crease. He repaired them when I had, in my excitement or carelessness, scuffed them into injury. His repairs were imperfect—his bindings too tight, or loose, his glue uneven—but they were his. And I saw in them something I never quite saw elsewhere: his attention. Not the loud, declarative kind, but the quiet, almost monastic presence of someone tending to what he could not fully enter but refused to let degrade.

I now think that he loved me best not in words, which came haltingly to him, nor in gestures, which he distrusted, but in the act of saving my books. In touching the things I had touched, in preserving the fragile paper worlds I escaped into, he found a way—awkward, silent, and wholly his own—to reach me.