Hazaribagh in Bihar in the early 1960s. I was 10 when I first got to know Dr Binoy Chatterjee. I don’t know how old he was, but he looked pretty old to me because when you are 10, everyone beyond 40 looks like a centenarian. Dr  Chatterjee was our family doctor, a homeopath, and I don’t think he charged us a penny. He was a big, burly man but I think he had some problems with his feet because they were always bandaged and he never stepped out of his house. Why do I remember him after almost 60 years? Because he introduced me to the wonders of the English language and the habit of reading.

I was studying in St Xavier’s and, as you can imagine, we were given a constant overdose of the classics, Wren and Martin and Palgrave. These did not, however, excite Dr Chatterjee much. “Abhoy,” he used to counsel me in that rolling Bengali accent which in later days Mamata Banerjee transformed into a rolling pin, “Classical literature is useful, but it puts the English language into a strait-jacket. Na, baba, it makes it too serious. Language must be fun, you should be able to play with it like a puppy with a ball; it should be capable of many meanings, like the fleeting glance of a beautiful woman.” I saw what he meant, vaguely; I had a puppy at home and every woman looked beautiful to me, but each in a different way. And so the good doctor took it upon himself to initiate me into the unfettered world of an English language that could convey the joy of living, and not just its grim tragedies.

Leave the classics in school, he told me sternly, and plied me instead with Mark Twain, Steinbeck, Oscar Wilde, JH Chase, Perry Mason, Bennett Cerf, JJ Hunter, Jim Corbett, Max Brand, Billy Bunter, Zane Grey, Manohar Malgaonkar, Alistair Maclean, Spike Milligan, Richard Gordon, even the first edition of Fitzgerald’s ‘Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’! He had the most wonderful collection, carefully packed in cartons, catalogued and indexed. On top of his list was PG Wodehouse.

The prescription was simple: one’s reading must be eclectic, every genre is as important as the next, if reading is not fun then it’s a waste of time. And then there were the magazines: Punch, RD, Imprint and a glossy precursor of the National Geographic whose name I now cannot recall. And I didn’t have to buy a single book: Dr Chatterjee had trunk loads and disbursed them to me lovingly, after conducting a short viva voce on each book returned by me!

The good doctor’s bug made me a bookworm for life. My family moved to Calcutta, where my grandfather had two bookshops in New Market and one in the Grand Hotel. I soon struck a Trumpian deal with him: during my school/college holidays, I would help in selling the books (for which I received a commission of 4 annas per book), and spend the rest of the time devouring as many more as I could. I could never afford to buy a new book, of course, having started life on a pocket money of 5 rupees a month, which subsequent inflation took to 25 in my college days.

So, one scoured College Street in Calcutta, Navin Market in Kanpur and the Red Fort/Chor Bazaar markets in Delhi in later life for second-hand books. I still have them — handsome, leather-bound, picked up for as little as 8 annas in those pre-globalisation days. Till today, I cannot buy a book at its printed price — it has to be a discounted Amazon one, a Book Fair offering, or a gift! Old habits, like old Gods, die hard.

During this journey from Mulk Raj Anand to Bill Bryson, however, I have picked up quite a few quirks. During my younger days, I was not beyond filching a book or two from a bookshop when in a severe state of penury, which was most of the time. The SOP was quite simple, really: walk in with three books and walk out with four, the desired title sandwiched between the others. Fortunately, this phase didn’t last long, preventing me from becoming the head librarian in Tihar jail.

I don’t like people borrowing books: I consider it an invasion of my private space and akin to borrowing someone’s girlfriend. I hoard newly bought books and defer reading them for as long as I can. It’s like these tomes are my capital, a kind of fixed deposit, and reading them would amount to breaking the FD and depleting this precious stock. So, at any given time, I always have 10 or 15 unread books on my shelves and feel the richer for it.

My sons have tried to introduce me to Kindle and digital reading, without success. How does one explain to them that a book is a living entity and not a jumble of algorithms? That it must feel good to touch; the smell of paper, ink and time fondly reminds one of where and when it was bought (or filched); enables one to make notes in the margins. It’s a difficult feeling to convey, but I think Jawaharlal Nehru came closest to it, though in an entirely different context. At a formal dinner, Nehru and Lord Mountbatten were having tandoori chicken. Nehru was eating with his fingers, but Mountbatten was making heavy weather of it with knife and fork. Panditji could not contain himself: “My lord, use your fingers. Eating tandoori chicken with a knife and fork is like making love to a beautiful woman through an interpreter, you know!” That is exactly what Kindle does to reading: it can make you a promiscuous reader but not a faithful or satiated one.

I have just acquired my latest tome, Yuval Harari’s ‘Home Deus’. It’s at number 16 of my waitlisted books, and in the normal course its turn for reading should come in 2026 or 2027. But it is all of 1,000 pages and weighs about 2 kg. If I wait too long, the Grim Reaper may knock on my doors before I finish it.

I have seriously considered doing a Chetan Bhagat to it, i.e. read the first and last pages only, and instantly get the gist of all that lies in-between. But that would be worse than using an interpreter — it would be like employing a stenographer. So I think I’ll just give it away to Arnab Goswami. It will fill the yawning gaps in his education but best of all, it would make Dr Chatterjee happy: he loved to show the light to Philistines.