I Hid Novels Inside My Textbooks
Physics on the outside, other worlds within, my double education.
Between the ages of eleven and sixteen I logged roughly four thousand hours of physics study, and the sum total of physics I retained is that a body at rest stays at rest. I retained it because I was the body, at rest, at my desk, with a novel wedged inside my physics textbook, reading about people who were anything but.
Let me describe the apparatus, because there was real engineering in it, arguably the only engineering my study hours ever produced. You need a big textbook, and physics textbooks are built like doors. You need a small paperback, and the two-rupee lending library behind the vegetable market stocked nothing else: Sherlock Holmes with the covers gone soft, Feluda, Malgudi Days, an abridged Count of Monte Cristo that some previous criminal had already underlined.
You seat the paperback in the valley of the open textbook, spine to spine, like a stowaway lying flat in a lifeboat.
Then you maintain the instrumentation: one pen in hand at all times, uncapped, hovering, suggesting imminent calculation. Every few minutes you turn a page of the big book with theatrical weariness, sigh at Newton, and descend again into Paris, into the Baker Street fog, into Malgudi.
The pen was crucial.
A boy with a pen is studying. A boy without a pen is dreaming, and dreaming was a punishable offense in our house during term time.
There were dangers. The greatest was velocity.
You read a story at story speed, and story speed shows: the eyes go too fast, the breath changes, and once, fatally, I laughed out loud at nine forty at night with the house dead quiet and Wren and Martin open in front of me. My mother appeared at the door with the specific expression of a woman who knows grammar has never once made her son happy. I converted the laugh into a cough with such commitment that I got Vicks rubbed on my chest and a day off school, which, I want the record to show, I spent reading.
My little sister discovered the system when she was eight and ran a blackmail operation of frankly impressive discipline. One glass of Rasna per week, delivered to her room, and her silence was guaranteed. I paid it for two years. She has since moved into management consulting, where I gather the work is similar.
I did feel guilt... not about the deception, about the marks. Report cards would arrive like weather bulletins for a storm everyone could already see: sixty-one in physics, sixty-three in chemistry, and then, gleaming and suspicious at the bottom, ninety-four in English. My class teacher told my father the marks made no sense together. She was wrong. They made perfect sense. They were a customs declaration: this is what got through officially, and that number down there is the smuggled cargo.
Every hidden novel was a tunnel out of a room that everyone believed I was sitting in. I attended two schools at the same desk, and only one of them ever took attendance.
The catastrophe came in board exam year, as catastrophes do. A February evening, my prelims a month away, Edmond Dantes newly escaped and richer than God, and I did not hear my father come in.
No creak, no cough.
He was simply there, beside the desk, looking down at the open physics textbook with the paperback lying in it like a patient on a table.
The protocol for such moments was well established in our lane. Confiscation, a lecture with historical references to his own hardships, possibly the cancellation of cricket. I stood up, which is what you did. He picked up the novel, looked at the cover, looked at me for four full seconds... and left the room without one word.
I have sat through some long nights since. Hospital corridors, election results, a wedding where I was the groom. Nothing has ever lasted longer than that night... waiting for the sentence that did not come.
The next morning the novel was back on my desk.
There was a folded bus ticket in it, marking a page eighty pages past where I had stopped. And on my study timetable, in his handwriting, in the margin next to Saturday, one line: "The ending is better than the middle. Derivations first."
He had read it in the night.
My father, who to my knowledge read only the newspaper and the electricity meter, had sat up with my contraband and outpaced me by eighty pages.
It took until I was twenty-five and he was mellow to get the full story out of him. In his day the family had a cloth shop, and his own father kept the ledgers, and a boy was expected to sit at the counter and learn the ledgers the way I was expected to learn physics. So he had hidden novels inside the ledgers. Same engineering, same pen hovering over the accounts, same story speed in the eyes. His father had caught him with a torn secondhand copy of something or other, and there had been no bus ticket in the morning, no note...
There had been the other thing.
"So when I saw yours," he told me, shrugging, "I had two examples in front of me. Mine was better." That shrug is the finest piece of literary criticism I have ever received.
We never spoke of it directly again, but the border stayed open. Novels began appearing in the house with cover stories attached: this one a colleague was throwing away, this one came free with something, nobody buys books, what nonsense. By my final year of school my physics textbook was hiding books my own father had smuggled to me, a supply chain so absurd that neither party could acknowledge it without the whole economy collapsing.
I scraped through the boards. Sixty-eight in physics, a number I am still faintly proud of, given how little of my attention it was working with. And then I did the thing the hidden books had been training me for all along, though it took years and one terrifying decision to go through with it: I started writing my own. The smuggled hours turned out to be the real syllabus. Later, when I finally got serious about learning to write properly, with feedback and craft and deadlines, my first honest exercise came from a prompt that asked for an early memory of joy, and I did not have to think for even a second. A desk. A pen, hovering. A door in a textbook.
People assume writers are made by great teachers or great grief. Some are. I was made by boredom and a lending library and everything I now file under childhood: the Rasna tax, the bus ticket bookmark, the four seconds my father looked at me and chose to be better than his example.
There is a coda. On my writing desk today sits my old physics textbook, bought back from a raddi shop for thirty rupees out of pure sentiment. It is the only book from school I kept. And it still does its old job, because that is where I keep my unfinished drafts, folded flat in the valley of the open pages, spine to spine.
Physics on the outside. Other worlds within. The smuggling route, I am pleased to report, runs both ways now.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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