28 More of my Magnificent Obsessions
I am a bibliophile and at times my obsessive-compulsive desire to collect and hoard books verges on bibliomania. As a child, I was extremely possessive of my books and made sure they were securely kept in a locked wooden cupboard – my childhood friend Anjum used to tease and threaten me, by threatening to fold the pages and tamper with my books!
After reading and collecting of books, my next magnificent obsession was Train Travel – I had been undertaking train journeys with my parents from the age of 6; and was endlessly fascinated with trains, especially steam engines. In our old house in Krishna Sadan, I had written out all the names of suburban stations from Churchgate to Virar on the walls of our toilet – I could recite these names from memory and in the right sequence!
I would study the Bradshaw book, that contained train timings and the names of the various stations and I could also identify various steam engines like the WP and WG models which were used to haul Mail and Express trains in those days.
I loved the AH Wheeler and Higginbothams railway book stalls which were found at all major junctions and important stations. Similarly there were railway caterers like Spencers and Brandons, which in those days provided refreshments to the 1st class passengers.
And now my next obsession – I was totally mesmerized by the boarding school books of Enid Blyton and Frank Richards’ Billy Bunter series. The boarding school life was what I craved to experience including the tuck shops, school boy uniforms with the cap, teachers like Mr Quelch with their mortar boards, latin conjugations and the rest of it. This extreme obsession made me look up various boarding schools in India and abroad – I recall getting a glossy brochure from a Swiss School in St Gallen but alas I soon realized that my Father could never afford to send me to any of these schools. But the seed was nevertheless quietly germinating within me and later as we progress with my memoir, we will see how this particular desire would be fulfilled and how this in turn would affect my life and spirituality.
