Krishna Shastri Devulapalli | Publishing As A Midlife Crisis

Other people have their midlife crises in their forties. They get a Harley, tattoos of dragons with misspelt, misattributed quotes on their forearm or a twenty-something girlfriend sporting misspelt, misattributed tattoos to ride pillion on their Harley.

Till he falls off somewhere on the way to Coorg or Manali, lies all alone (because the agile girlfriend has escaped unscathed and hitched a ride home on a lorry) sprawled next to a bewildered buffalo for a day or two, pondering on the meaning of life, and, as the dung he’s covered in cakes into a comforting carapace, allows good sense to return, goes crawling back to the wife and kids, sells the mangled remains of the bike to a scrap merchant, and takes off piously to Tirumala, shirtless, with a silk angavastram covering the bruises from the ignominious fall on NH 48, as prayaschittam. And lives happily ever after.

But not me. I had to let the forties and fifties pass by somewhat uneventfully, semi-happily leading a life of humdrummery, and wait till the rickety dawn of senior citizenhood to have mine. (Making it a three-quarterlife crisis, actually). And what did I do? No fluorescent, floral-printed slim-fit shirts for me. No salsa lessons or a change in my sexual orientation, either, like any normal guy heading towards senility. No, sirree.

I decided to start a publishing house.

And managed to convince my wife, the sanest human I know, that it was a fantastic idea.

Truth be told, the success of my midlife crisis hinged entirely on my wife’s approval. It was her over-three-decade experience as a publishing professional that I was hoping to piggyback on. And based on her passion, flair and labour, turn my irrelevant life into one where I’d have to apply sunscreen to shield myself from the glare of the spotlight. And pretend, like all men, that it was all solely my greatness, my doing.

Why, you may ask, would you set off on such an enterprise when you can continue to slouch arthritically over your computer, quietly write your middlebrow books, and hand them over to those big publishing houses with their shiny logos, who’ll do their darndest to make sure that, like all your previous literary efforts, no one reads them, sending you royalty statements signed off with an LOL! every March and September? Why give up the comfort and guarantee of that?

One of my earliest olfactory memories is the smell of new books, the heady mix of ink, glue and paper pressed against zinc blocks, emanating from fifty press-hot copies stacked up in a neat pile, being tied up in bundles with twine by my dad to be sent off to some wholesaler.

In the ’70s, at home, something was always prepping to go to press, had gone to press or had arrived hot off the presses, to be mailed in perfectly put together brown paper parcels (Dad was an expert packer) to an agent somewhere. It could be one of my father’s, grandfather’s or a fellow writer’s books. And in later years, greeting cards, catalogues and calendars as well.

My father’s regular evening ritual in those days was a visit to a neighbourhood press called Eveready Printers. It was usually preceded by a stopover at Shanta Bhavan for dosai and coffee. His daily drop-ins at Eveready Printers had a dual-purpose. One: a book, letterhead, greeting card or catalogue was always in press. Two: Venkataraman, the mustachioed Tamil-version of Ronald Colman, and manager of the press, much like Dad, was a Golden Age of Hollywood aficionado.

As Dad and his friend revisited old Hollywood in the office, I would sneak off into the press area at the back and watch the machines at work. Eveready Printers had a couple of letterpress machines and even a Heidelberg (the name was always uttered in a reverential whisper by Dad).

I was mesmerized by the machine with the rotating arms, tirelessly pick up a blank sheet of paper with one arm, put it neatly, precisely, in place, to have a coloured block press against it and have the other arm pick it up all printed and ready. In the background, a man wearing soda-buddi glasses patiently packed tiny mirror-image metal letters into wooden frames to make words and sentences and paragraphs. He was a compositor, I was told.

My favourite, though, was the cutting/trimming machine. Nothing matched the thrill of a metre-high stack of identical sheets having their edges guillotined by a lethally sharp, manually operated blade that came down with a satisfying ker-scrunch. The cutting room literally had no floor. It was covered wall to wall with ribbons of paper. I was told it was called paper jelly and that it earned the press a neat packet when sold by the kilo.

So, perhaps, my midlife crisis is just a family ailment, passed down from father to son. Maybe I felt that writing alone wasn’t doing it for me. Maybe my life has no choice but to be inextricably intertwined with printers, binders, paper merchants and those unique creatures we refer to as writers.

Got to go now. Have five books by our writer to pack and mail.