Lolita

Penguin has brought out cheaper versions of a number of books, you would otherwise pay a fortune for. The series in flaming orange will instantly catch your eye. I love how houses like Rupa and Penguin make books more affordable for people like me. So, when a single copy of "Lolita" stared at me from the bookshelf at Education Book House, my hand just went out despite myself, picked it, and without another look, it got piled on top of other five books I was already buying.

Lolita. My first copy of the book was something I found in a stationery store in Boudha. I had bought it for three hundred rupees. It had a cover of a woman with red nail tips, lipstick, dress and a black hat. Her face hardly showed, apart from those grossly glossed lips and a pair of huge glares that covered the rest of her face. Her legs stretched over what seemed like the bumper of a black car. Much that I hated the cover, I bought it. It was a pirated copy. This was eight years ago. I knew what the cover meant. It was only an attempt to suggest, reiterate the "Lolita" was after all, porn.

IT ISN'T!

The book stayed with me until a friend borrowed it and told me she would not return it. You will wonder if she really said that. She did. She said, I'm keeping it. And I'm keeping your "One hundred years of solitude" and your "Emily Dickinson" collection. I still have her "The Bluest Eye".

So, buying it again yesterday was making up for the little gap in my collection of books- a retirement policy. (Most of those that haven't been read, will be read when I retire. Hopefully, those borrowed out leaving yawning gaps in my shelf, will also return to me by the time I'm 60.)

The other time I had almost bought Lolita, was in Manila, in a second hand book store. My room-mate Germie and I would visit this store everyday. EVERYDAY. And we would lust over their amazing collection and covet everything, even though it easily outdid our book allowance.

I remember Germie and me staring at a copy of Lolita and chorusing, "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins". A streak of madness and evil got into us and we made our dorm-mate Sengtong (the sweetest and the most innocent chap I ever came across) repeat after us. He did. And asked us, what is loin? This was followed by very, very evil laughter and then pats and apologies.

Sengtong, at that time, had been reading the American Colonial History and Contemporary Philosophy. His was a voluminous copy with portraits of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. He would quote to us from it and we would ask him, "How can you read that stuff, Seng?"

And there was this cute undergrad kid, Kevin, who had all the philosophies on his finger-tips and called Derrida an "Emo" because he had deconstructed himself. He would debate Germie and me nights over what the philosophers said. And I always felt like asking him, "Kevin, what are you doing reading all this at 19?" But like the other kids of his age in the dorm, he also spent a lot of time laughing at Youtube.

Germie and me, in our evil selves, only read what made us happy in those days, against the piling assignments. Germie's world was the lives of the saints. I was buried in Lahiri, Faulkner and Chopin. She would return from the library sometimes, in a daze and say, Pratish, do you know how they tortured the saints? And I would tell her, do you know Chopin was condemned because she wrote stories about an unhappily-married woman, who kissed a man she didn't love and waited all her life for the one she did?

Germie and I would have bought the book store if we had the money. She would have spent all her money posting the books home and I would have killed myself over my luggage, probably dumped my clothes in our room in Esteban Abada, just so the books had space.

But you can chase books all over the world if you have the money. And so, at three hundred twenty ruppes, with a plain orange cover lined with cream and the title neatly in black, Lolita looks pretty. Germie had wanted to buy a copy, too. But refrained. Maybe I should send her my new copy.