By Harihar Tripathy
Brahmananda was a man who didn’t just read books; he lived in them. To him, a book wasn’t just paper and ink; it was a soul waiting to speak.
That afternoon, while riding his bike, something caught his eye on the dusty shoulder of the road. He stopped, leaned over, and his heart sank. There, lying in the dirt, discarded like a piece of worthless trash, was a rare volume on the life and philosophy of the saint-poet Bhima Bhoi.
“What kind of mindless fool would throw this away?” Brahmananda muttered, his eyes stinging with a mix of anger and grief. He picked up the book with the tenderness one would show a wounded bird. He wiped the thick layer of dust with his handkerchief, kissed the cover in a silent apology to the great poet, and tucked it safely into his leather handbag.
When he reached home, he felt a sense of victory, as if he had rescued a king from a gutter. But the victory was short-lived.
As soon as he stepped inside, his wife reached for his bag to help him put it away. Her fingers brushed against the rough, old edges of the rescued book. When she pulled it out, her face contorted in disgust.
“What is this filth?” she screamed, her voice hitting a sharp, angry note. “Why do you keep bringing these dirty, moth-eaten rags into the house? Look at the dust on your bag now!”
Brahmananda sighed, reaching for the book. “You wouldn’t understand. Just leave it. I’ll keep it in my study.”
“Your study?” she scoffed. “The whole house is turning into a junkyard! There’s nothing here but old paper. No space for people, just space for dust!”
In a fit of sudden, unbridled rage, she turned to his bookshelf. She grabbed a handful of books and flung them across the room. They landed with heavy thuds near the shoe stand, amidst the mud and leather.
There they lay—the ‘Emperor of Poets’ Upendra Bhanja, the modern master Ramakant Rath, and the legendary storyteller Manoj Das—strewn like casualties of war at the feet of the household’s footwear.
At that moment, his daughter, a student of a prestigious English medium school, walked into the room. She glanced at the pile of books on the floor and then at her father’s distraught face.
“Dad,” she said casually, checking her phone, “Why don’t you just sell this old scrap to the junk dealer? It’s taking up so much space, and they look so… dated. You can find everything on the internet anyway.”
Brahmananda felt a cold shiver. To his wife, they were trash. To his daughter, they were commodities to be sold. The wisdom of centuries was being weighed against the price of old paper.
He walked over to the shoe stand and knelt on the floor. With trembling hands, he began to pick up the fallen masters. He picked up Manoj Das, then Upendra Bhanja, and finally, the dust-covered Bhima Bhoi he had rescued from the road.
As he clutched the books to his chest, the famous lines of Bhima Bhoi echoed in the hollow chambers of his soul:
“Mo jibana pache narke padithau, jagata uddhara heu…”
(Let my life rot in hell, if it leads to the salvation of the world…)
He looked at his beautiful home, his angry wife, and his indifferent daughter. He realized he was living his own version of that prayer. He was willing to endure the “hell” of being misunderstood and ridiculed in his own home, as long as he could save these silent, paper-bound worlds from the darkness of oblivion.
He didn’t say a word. He simply carried his treasures into his room and closed the door, leaving the modern world outside.
