STAYCATION

Photo credit:www.amazon.com,www.global.penguinrandonhouse.com,www.bookdepository.com
Memory tag: Globetrotting with Peter Mayle’s A year in Provence, Herman Wouk’s The Will to Live On and Orhan Pamuk’s Red.

Surviving on a diet of whatever was prescribed while on my last project, I have taken a forced staycation. I am short changed for normal holidays, economic and otherwise. So I Imagine a day added to the sanctioned Sabbath a seven day break instead of just two! I pack in three books to read. They could be staycation starters or primers for my next project. Each one of them a delight to encounter! Over endless cups of tea poured out from the patient teapot demurely tea cozy clad, I pick up Peter Mayle’s 1987 book A Year in Provence . I cannot put down this adroit pen sketch of everyday life in rural France , punctuated with laughter, commonsense, uncommon folk wisdom and folk, and food! The last just leaps out - cheeses, breads, truffles, vegetables, meats, and fish and of course liquid nourishment from the vines! A recurring repast that makes me feel completely food deprived!

I read for two hours oblivious of charms the golden winter weather outside my window. Even the songs of the wintering birds do not distract me. This is an orange and cream vintage Penguin volume- that fits neatly into my hand. At less than two hundred rupees, it manages to echo the wisdom of Sir Allen Lane, the Penguin books founder who believed in the existence of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price and staked everything on it! Thus was born Penguin books when its founder found only popular magazines and poor quality paperbacks to read on British railway stations in 1935.

If tea pots could curse, mine would! So often have I tipped it over to pour out yet another cup of Shillong grown and brewed tea. This strong cuppa is unmatched and all else pales in significance when outside Meghalaya. Later in the day I go back to reading Herman Wouk’s The Will to Live On. A wonderful, non fictional compendium of the saga of the Jewish people. Having cut my teeth on Erich Segal, and bought an Atlas of the Bible Lands to follow his Acts of Faith, walking the Jewish trail is only natural for me. The added bonus is the thumbnails of historical events that bring the background of the saga into sharp focus. It is poignant and objective at the same time. 

Later in my staycation, I am in Istanbul courtesy Orhan Pamuk. It has all the usual Pamuk motifs of a certain melancholy, the past, another incarnation and yet it brings alive the streets of Istanbul via his memories of the city. Frame after frame he brings images that underline the fact that this city has made him what he is! A childhood memoir that makes me want to book the next flight to this ancient seat of civilization. I rather choose a magic carpet against the Boeing whatever. It is environment friendly, ethnic, free and only needs the imagination to fuel it!

In my staycation or stay at home vacation, spending less than a thousand rupees - I travel, I meet, I visit, I greet fellow human beings across the globe, across time, through this now increasingly less popular medium the book. It is so very disheartening to see book stores in Shillong shrinking and their shelf space being given to yuppie hallmarks of bright plastic stationery and cosmetic nothings! Cafes and coffee shops dot he landscape. But where is the storyteller who held the coffee drinkers enthralled? Where is the pen that wrote and the mind that read? “Busy man, busy”! Like Munnabhai MBBS is wont to say! Take a break! Read! This is our common inheritance, tax free, only asking to be read!