The cover of a Reynolds novel

During a cha break at the canteen of National Library about 30 years ago I ran into a friend and colleague from the comparative literature department at Jadavpur University. Inevitably we talked about what we had been reading. I had been reading the John Dicks edition of the works of G.W.M. Reynolds in the Ashutosh collection and began to explain that Reynolds was a 19th century journalist, editor, Chartist and novelist, considered a sort of trash king by Victorian literati in the way Judith Krantz or Sidney Sheldon are viewed now. My friend, the late Subir Roychoudhuri, knew all about him already and I learnt for the first time that Reynolds’s fiction had been highly popular in colonial Bengal, in the original, via translation and adaptation. A few days later he presented me with a Bengali translation of Reynolds’s Joseph Wilmot which will always be one of my dearest possessions.

His information was very intriguing. I immediately decided to find out how three 80-plus men I knew had reacted to Reynolds in their youth. They were my father-in-law, writer and formerly history professor at Ripon College and Jadavpur University and two of his best buddies Subodh Chandra Sengupta (writer and retired professor of English from Jadavpur) and Nirmal Maitra (retired B.C.S., author and great believer in the good things of life).

I remember vividly the immediate response of each of these three: a toothless or dentured grin that lit up their faces with remembered pleasure. My father-in-law told me that he had read him like he had read Dickens in his younger days. Nirmal Maitra recalled with gusto the section in The Mysteries of London in which a young boy goes with a map through underground sewers of London and then up the pipes into the bedchamber or the toilet of the newly married Queen Victoria in Buckingham Palace. Subodh Sengupta told my father-in-law with a twinkle in his eye: “You should not allow your daughter-in-law to read such obscene (aslil) stuff!”

A friend who turned 72 recently asked his daughter to present him with some works of Hemendra Kumar Ray. He felt he was now what in Bangla is called bahatture, therefore eligible for second childhood. The daughter laughingly obliged and he has since then revisited many childhood pleasures and memories, most of all the bonding with his much older brother, a young adult in his first job, who still bought and read several Hemendra Kumar stories whenever he could and passed them on to his kid brother with inscriptions such as “This one will make your hair stand up on end” or “No more books for you this month.”

He also recalled the Ballygunge Institute on Rashbehari Avenue (opposite Aleya cinema) from which he borrowed and insatiably read works by this author, Premendra Mitra and Shibram Chakravarti. He relived walks with his father through south Calcutta, dotted with the homes of great teachers, artists, writers who knew each other well and who would meet frequently in each others’ homes and on the street for long addas.

It was an innocent world when reading gave a growing child all the excitement and entertainment he craved: the inaccuracies of Hemendra Kumar (such as the light of the moon filtered through the trees on what he had just labelled a new moon night) were noted and then bypassed. Treasures were available in places not to be found on any known map. Murder and mayhem would take one to exotic destinations with extra-terrestrials and dinosaurs galore. You suspended disbelief or even belief: the sheer pace of the narrative took you along with it. Googling, e-toys and screen adaptations did not compete with days and nights of impassioned reading.

A younger generation than ours is filled with nostalgia on hearing the news of the death of Anant Pai.

Going back to one’s earlier reading to relive your younger days is an experience like no other.