City Reading – The Delhi Proustians XXX, Fact & Fiction Booksellers

A la recherche du temps perdu.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Today is the 30th meeting of The Delhi Proustians, a club for Delhiwallas that discusses French novelist Marcel Proust. Every Monday evening for an hour we read his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time.

Each week we meet in a new venue to dive into the atmosphere of Marcel’s novel.

It is 7 pm and The Delhi Walla is at the Fact & Fiction booksellers in Basant Lok Market. This is the city’s only bookshop to have three different-looking editions of Proust’s novel. Although the owner rarely smiles (and smirks frequently), his collection suits the requirements of a sophisticated browser, and so he must be tolerated and patronized.

Having finished the first two volumes of Proust, I have grown more confident of finishing the remaining four. I turn to page 6 of The Guermantes Way, the third volume.

At the age when Names, offering us an image of the unknowable which we have poured into their mould, while at the same moment connoting for us also a real place, forces us accordingly to identify one with the other to such a point that we set out to seek in a city for a soul which it cannot embody but which we have no longer the power to expel from the sound of its name, it is not only to towns and rivers that names give an individuality, as do allegorical paintings, it is not only the physical universe which they pattern with differences, people with marvels, there is the social universe also; and so every historic house, in town or country, has its lady or its fairy, as every forest has its spirit, as there is a nymph for every stream. Sometimes, hidden in the heart of its name, the fairy is transformed to suit the life of our imagination by which she lives; thus it was that the atmosphere in which Mme de Guermantes existed in me, after having been for years no more than the shadow cast by a magic lantern slide or the light falling through a painted window, began to let its colours fade when quite other dreams impregnated it with the bubbling coolness of her flowing streams.

For me, that fairy is the Princess of Rampur, the oldest child of the last Nawab of that state. The Princess lives in central Delhi’s Nizamuddin East, near the tomb of the Mughal-era poet Khan-i-Khana. Until a few months ago, I regularly stood in front of her bungalow trying to imagine the life within its windows. I would dream of seeing the Princess sitting in her parlour, surrounded by her royal underlings, condescendingly listening to them talk of society gossip.

The Princess, I would think, must be too rich, too grand, and too elegant. She must have seen all the great cities of the world. How could I ever come into contact with her?

And yet the fairy must perish if we come in contact with the real person to whom her name corresponds, for that person the name then begins to reflect, and she has in her nothing of the fairy; the fairy may revive if we remove ourself from the person, but if we remain in her presence the fairy definitely dies and with her the name, as happened to the family of Lusignan, which was fated to become extinct on the day when the fairy Mélusine should disappear.

One late summer morning I found myself sitting in the Princess’s parlour. After a long wait, she appeared. She was in a nightie.

I thought the fairy would perish.

But then the Princess started to speak. Her voice was stern. It was so severe, I think, because of her father, her grandfather, her great grandfather, and his father; they were the Nawabs, the rulers entrusted with the task of disposing of the lives and deaths of their vassals in Rampur. The pride and haughtiness of those men now ran in the blood of their descendants.

Then the Name, beneath our successive ‘restorations’ of which we may end by finding, as their original, the beautiful portrait of a strange lady whom we are never to meet, is nothing more than the mere photograph, for identification, to which we refer in order to decide whether we know, whether or not we ought to bow to a person who passes us in the street. But let a sensation from a bygone year–like those recording instruments which preserve the sound and the manner of the various artists who have sung or played into them–enable our memory to make us hear that name with the particular ring with which it then sounded in our ears, then, while the name itself has apparently not changed, we feel the distance that separates the dreams which at different times its same syllables have meant to us.

It is half past seven and the bookshop owner is preparing to close the store. We will meet next week.

The 31st meeting of The Delhi Proustians takes place on 29 October 2012.

Where Nicholson Street, Kashmere Gate Time 7 pm Nearest Metro Station Kashmere Gate

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