A Life in Books

A daughter learns how stories have shaped her world

- Farah Naaz

"I did not always know how to eat an ice cream cone, said my 78-year-old father to his grandkids who greeted this anecdote with incredulous laughter. The thought of someone not knowing the 'how-tos' to anything perhaps seemed ludicrous to them. After all, theirs' is a hyper-connected world, where a single tap on a phone can crack open every mystery, in bite-sized, easy-to-consume pieces.

This was in 2020. COVID may have stopped the world in its tracks, but my father, unperturbed, sat in my home regaling my children with stories of his boyhood. As family folklore went, neither he nor our uncle-who emigrated from a small village called Mahdauli in Bihar to the Unites States-knew how to eat an ice cream cone. Household legend has it that my uncle would routinely leave his wafer cones to languish away in the dustbins of New York's bustling streets, after fastidiously scooping out the ice cream.

This memory came rushing back to me as I sat rearranging my father's books in his library at our ancestral home in Bihar. The shelves are filled with copies of Amar Chitra Katha, Tintin comics, Ruskin Bond novels, a few Urdu collections, books we won as prizes in school and numerous copies of Reader's Digest.

The books sat bundled together; quite a few with their spines starting to separate from their yellowed, well-thumbed pages. But even in their battered state they held within them the universe of my childhood-a whole way of life preserved. After a lifetime's journey from Bihar to West Bengal, to Madhya Pradesh then Maharashtra, these treasured tomes were finally home. I picked up a Digest at random, an edition from 1973, and, flipping through it, stopped. There on the page I had opened up to was an article titled How to eat an ice cream cone.