One of the few things we carried with us while moving to our new house was a suitcase full of books, most of them from my parents’ college days. They were prized possessions, not to be left behind.
Their pages were frayed and yellowed, having passed through many hands and read and re-read several times. There were also ones they had bought and relished together.
Unlike our tharavadu (ancestral house), where the books had to be crammed into a small shelf in our room, our new home had many bookshelves built into the wall. My mother took it upon herself to arrange the books neatly into the shelves.
