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Book Box: Sorrow and Bliss, The Go-Between and books for a hospital wait
From Sorrow and Bliss to The Go-Between, these are the books that offered comfort, escape and companionship during long hours in a hospital waiting room
Dear Reader,
My bag is full of books. Only I cannot read.
In the waiting room of the intensive care unit, people stand in groups, talking quietly amongst themselves. A man across from me works on his laptop. The lady next to me gets up to go somewhere and leaves her bag behind so her seat won’t get taken.
In my bag are murder mysteries: Death of a Nag, Death of a Hussy and Death of a Scriptwriter by M.C. Beaton.
We discovered Hamish Macbeth, the Scottish village policeman, years ago at an Independence Day book sale by Ashish Books in Fort, Mumbai, and we have been hooked ever since.
The stories are set in a beautiful Scottish village full of lovable characters. There’s Priscilla, who is Hamish’s love interest and also plays Watson—that is, whenever she is not handling her irate father, Colonel Halburton, who has had to turn the family estate into a hotel after he went bankrupt. And best of all, there is Towser, the endearing yellow mongrel who is the complete antithesis of a police dog. This series has been an instant hit with everyone in our family, and we read and re-read these books as comfort food.
There are other books, picked up hastily from the family bookshelves. Like Occupational Hazard by the British politician Rory Stewart. I loved Stewart’s travelogue about Afghanistan, The Places in Between, and have been meaning to read this one, set in Iraq. And Books: A Manifesto or, How to Build a Library by Ian Patterson.
The lady next to me returns with a paper glass full of tea. She seems to be watching a YouTube video. I hear the sounds, a distinct, hyper-cheery declamation, but not the words. After a while, someone asks her to use earphones. How interesting it is that that person isn’t me, I think. Why did I used to mind these sounds? Why did they drive me crazy?
I can’t read what’s in my hands, but in my head is a book I read last week, Sorrow and Bliss by the Australian writer Meg Mason. A woman called Martha tells us her story in two threads: the past and the present. Martha knows there is something wrong with her, but she doesn’t know what it is.
Martha is clever and funny, and her story is heartbreaking. And I loved the bond between Martha and her sister Ingrid; it is just so delicious, a force field that excludes everyone else. And yet eventually this bond too is diminished by jealousy, and this spoke so strongly to me because it felt a little like what happened between my sister and me.
Then there is the relationship between Martha and her mother, which sours once Martha becomes a teenager and something goes wrong with her. She tells us that her mother used to be indulgent and loving, calling her ‘Hum’, but now calls her ‘The Resident Critic’.
And through it all runs the relationship between Martha and Patrick, who loved her from the time they were teenagers and eventually becomes her husband. Patrick thinks she is fine. He says everyone has something; the thing is just to keep going.
Sorrow and Bliss is sitting in my head. If I were to pair it with another book, it would be with the magnificent Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto, where a little boy tells the story of his mother who has something wrong with her. I think about the two books and marvel at the way a point of view can transform how we see the world.
The hours pass: a day and a night, and maybe another night. Now I am in a regular room. The Other Reader is stable. Not fine, but a lot better, in a way that lets me breathe. A little.
I open my Kindle to a book strongly recommended in Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s newsletter The Internet Personified.
And I am hooked from the very first line: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
From middle-aged Martha in Sorrow and Bliss, I am now listening to a teenage boy tell his story in The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley. And I am wholly and completely subsumed in this world of a schoolboy. From Martha, who can’t control her own mind, to this schoolboy, who can’t control his world, the progression feels natural.
The Go-Between is a book full of summer and the countryside, of rising heat and a growing sense of danger. Our schoolboy is writing spells in a notebook and things are happening, and neither he nor I can quite tell what’s cause and what’s coincidence. Even as I am absorbed by the story, I am marvelling at the skill of the writing: the way this very real countryside world of rivers, haystacks and an aristocratic estate becomes the backdrop for a teenage boy caught in a game he doesn’t have the vocabulary for, trying to cast spells to control a world he can’t govern.
I can’t put it down. And for the first time in hours and days, I don’t feel the need to.
Soon, we will be packing up our bags, leaving the hospital corridors behind, and heading home. Ahead lies a stretch of rest and recuperation, with a houseful of books waiting, each one ready to meet us, whatever the weather of our minds.
And you, dear reader, what are your go-to books in times of crisis?
Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and Founder, Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. For all questions about life and literature email sonyasbookbox@gmail.com.
