By Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD

Many years ago, I had written an article about how cautious and even miserly I have become about lending my books, after having lost three of my most valuable books to friends who did not have the hearts to return them back to me.

When I say that they did not have the hearts to return them, it may seem like I am making an insinuation. Yes, I am and I am doing it because I had clearly told every one of those three friends how precious those books were to me. So, if they had had even the slightest regard for our friendship, they would certainly have returned them to me, with due care and a sense of responsibility.

Although I have already written in my article about what was so unusual about one of those books, I think a brief repetition here would not be unwarranted or out of place, because that article is perhaps now long forgotten, even by the most regular readers of Star of Mysore (SOM). So, here is the recap.

Way back in the late seventies, as a young MBBS student at Gulbarga, I used to take the night meter-gauge train from Bangalore to Guntakal, from where I used to catch the broad-gauge train that took me to my destination. On one such journey, as I was settling down on my berth and arranging my luggage, I found two nuns, with one of them looking like Mother Teresa, entering the coupe and putting their things down on the berth opposite mine.

I was greatly surprised and it took some time for me to make sure that it was indeed her. But although I had never met her, my doubts were dispelled when I saw a fairly large crowd of her admirers, standing outside the window of our coupe, shaking hands with her and bidding an emotional farewell to her. After the train started and she and her companion settled down on their seats, we exchanged greetings and began conversing.

Very soon the two nuns opened a small hamper in which they had packed their supper for the night and started sharing some sandwiches with me and the three other passengers in our coupe. Our brief conversation ended after that and before we could say goodbye, I decided to have Mother Teresa’s autograph and requested her for it, to which she agreed with a smile.

By some quirk of good luck and a very unusual coincidence I had a copy of my favourite author, A.J. Cronin’s book; The Keys of the Kingdom, in my handbag. I pulled it out and gave it to her, on the fly leaf of which she wrote; ‘May God bless you’ and affixed her signature below it. After that, we retired for the night and early the next morning, when we got down at Guntakal, we bid adieu to each other and headed out on our different ways.

That was my first and last meeting with the famous lady, who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and was later canonised as a saint by Pope Francis, in the year 2016. That book, written by A.J. Cronin in the year 1941, by another strange coincidence, was the story of the arduous and turbulent life of a Scottish Catholic priest, Father Francis Chisholm, who struggles to pursue his calling and establish a mission in China.

When I narrated this incident later, before a group of my friends and showed them the book with great pride, one of them asked me if he could borrow and read it, when I obliged, but not before telling him how precious it was to me and requesting him to return it back very carefully. He said he would but he never did.

Every time I reminded him about the book, he said that he had it safe with him but had misplaced it somewhere among his other books and would retrieve it very soon. That ‘very soon’ never came till we finished our MBBS and even internship, after which we parted ways inevitably, leaving me both angry and anguished but completely helpless.

By some quirky coincidence the two of us happened to meet, a full forty-seven years after we had parted and when I joked with him about my long overdue book, with a perplexed expression on his face, he told me that he never remembered what I was talking about!

The story of my other two books is equally painful to me but it has left me so much wiser that now I never lend any of my books, let alone rare and valuable ones. After reading my article, K.B. Ganapathy (KBG), my friend and the former Chief Editor of SOM, told me about a very rare and valuable coffee table book that he had lent to one of his friends and was regretting his act. The problem was that KBG himself had forgotten to whom he had given the book and was now at a loss to comprehend how he should find the borrower.

That was when I told him that it should be a very simple job for him to just put a notification in his own paper with a request to the borrower to return it back. He was pretty amused by my suggestion but the very next day the announcement appeared in SOM, prominently on its front page.

Three days after that there was a call from him, thanking me for my suggestion which he said had yielded an immediate result, in the form of the borrower returning the book. Thankfully, his forgotten friend turned out to be a much better one than my three friends, whom I’ll never be able to forget, in my lifetime!

Coming back to the present, I would like to tell you of another very unusual and interesting predicament related to a borrowed book. Very recently there was call from Dr. Devapriya Galagali, my former teacher from my medical college days, who is now settled down in Mysuru. A book lover like me, he was the man who first introduced me to the great joy of reading P.G. Wodehouse, the most humorous writer, who has become my most re-read author for the sheer joy that I get out of it!

My teacher had called me up to say that he had a P.G. Wodehouse book with him, which he had borrowed from someone long ago and had now forgotten from whom he had done it. He told me that he had called up many of his friends to locate the owner but in vain. He even sent me a picture of the book which had on its fly leaf, a very touching note from three children to their dad, being their gift to him on his 60th birthday which fell on 24th, July, 2006.

Now, for the second time, someone was telling me about borrowed books and while in the first case it was the owner of a book in search of the forgotten borrower, a pretty common place situation, in the second case it was a borrower in search of the forgotten owner, something that almost never happens! A most interesting and amusing situation indeed!

And, so here I am, playing the role of a Good Samaritan by writing about this in my column, with the fond hope that the owner of the book who should soon be celebrating his 80th birthday, or someone who knows him, will read about it and respond. To make things easy for everyone, I have given a picture of the book along with the loving inscription on the fly leaf. The phone number of Dr. Galagali is 93421-88658 and he would be most delighted to return the book in his possession, most gratefully, to its rightful owner or his family.

Now, my role here is very much like that of Cupid, in bringing two lovers together, because the love of books is no less than the love that exists between two people, enamoured with each other.

And, incidentally, I have played the real Cupid too, more than once and in almost all cases, my role has resulted in some very happy and long-lasting marriages. So, wish me luck and let’s hope that I succeed in my present mission too!