My grandfather had nothing to say when Lehman crashed.
I don’t know why I expected him to say anything, but I did. People were buying Das Kapital more than ever now. I remember our old copy. I saw it in the book case when I was a child. It was red, with gold lettering. Like all books at the time that came from Moscow Publishers, Russia, it was awe-inspiring- beautifully bound, exquisitely printed, with a charming smell- these would suffice- honestly, these spurred my imagination more than did Chekhov and Dostoevsky, in those days when you still believed things and stopped to smell the rain.
When we moved from the house with the book case full of red bound books, we couldn’t take the book-case along. We were all very upset about it. We all admitted anyway that there wasn’t space for the book-case; the new one would hold all of our books.
So it was that the book-case stayed where it was and we went our way, to return once in a while, to try to believe things and smell the rain.
I wonder why they don’t make books so beautiful now. The gold edges and the leather covers and the delicate pages and the beautiful printing- I wonder why. I do not like the fact that we have to buy paper backs now.
I’m sure you must have realised by now that I come from a family of bibliophiles. We’ve never had the money of course to indulge our interest in a maniacal way, even if we would like to; but we’ve always had our books- our own personal little library, our little sanctum.
Das Kapital was there for as long as I can remember. It taught my grandfather everything he needed to know.
And it was beautiful.
A very beautiful book.
And yet he had nothing to say when Wall Street very nearly crashed and people had hot debates on how Keynesian we ought to be. He was mainly concerned with growing coconut trees back at our ancestral home; he came back voicing loud complaints about the Agricultural Officer and the workers who never turned up.
In the meanwhile there were Maoists and Naxals trying to prove a point; perhaps inspired by heroes such as Che Guevara- several people in my college have Che Guevara T-shirts. One of them, I believe, thought he was a great motor cyclist- no doubt an impression developed on having heard vaguely about ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’.
My grandfather had nothing to say about them either. He was worried about the plantains and the jackfruit trees and the lack of labourers and the inefficiency of manure.
The little piece of land my grandfather so fondly looked after was his own. He had bought it, paid for it by saving up a few rupees every month from his very insubstantial salary, and built a house without a loan and lived there with his wife and children and a dog and two cows and plenty of chickens and a farm full of trees that gave and continue to give coconuts, jackfruits and plantains. When my grandmother was alive, there were roses and jasmine and pineapple and cashews. They left when she did.
In the outhouse, were stacks of magazines- the Illustrated Weekly, the Economic and Political Weekly, Yojana,, Janayugam (which was once quite good but now merely sings praises of the political party that supports it) and such things that afforded many hours of leisure and thought to my grandparents, my mother and her brother. One very rainy season, water swept into the outhouse and we lost the magazines.
My grandfather had nothing to say. Neither did my parents.
In another world, Unions called for strikes, my parents lost leaves for no reason because they couldn’t get to work and hence were feeling quite unsympathetic towards everyone from Marx to Lenin to Guevara. People yelled Inquilab Zindabad on the streets and the General Knowledge of Channel V’s Lolakutti proved beyond doubt that nobody cared or knew. I remembered that it was a fond slogan of my grandfather and others who gave up their lands before the Land Ceiling Act. I had things to say, but my grandfather was primarily bothered about getting rid of the algae from the canal that ran through our farm.
Meanwhile, our new house was furnished with capitalistic money that flowed in from beyond the seas. Upper class families sweltered in poverty and left their homes to new grounds because their land no longer cared.
The coconut trees were giving coconuts abundantly. Every summer we got jackfruits and plantains to eat, to make preserves and chips and all the rest.
And so, my grandfather was happy.
I read Ayn Rand.
Two weeks back, we went to get some books from the bookcase we were so loath to leave. But the termites had taken Das Kapital.
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