Book Box: A masterclass in cockroaches

Dear Reader,Words of protestI want to write about protest poetry, about protest memes and protest satire. About the power of words, and about naming that-which-should-not-be-named.All week at home we have been discussing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: the story of the students against the Ministry of Magic. Political appointees like Dolores Umbridge seizing control. The threats of violence from the Death Eaters. The parallels with real life feel uncanny.My phone pings. It is a poem from a hundred years ago. About a cockroach. Written by the American Don Marquis, and titled The Hen and the Oriole.Another ping, another poem—a tongue-in-cheek Conversation with a Cockroach by Indra Narayan Das. The cockroach, inspiration for Kafka’s protest against alienation, humiliation and invisibility, is back on centre stage.So much has happened, it almost feels like too much to take in, and this morning I have woken up with my mind clouded.The youngest member of our book club is going away. His company is sending him to New York next month, and therefore it has been decided that his girlfriend of four years and he will marry, and then he will leave while she applies for her visa. We met her for the first time last night, and I could see us through her: this group of older opinionated people who have somehow occupied an undue portion of real estate in her significant other’s mind, and yet also a group that loves him, that has shaped him, that will miss him.Anyway, they are off, and we had some farewell speeches, and it all felt kind of sad, as if nothing lasts, which is of course true.Driving home through rainy Mumbai streets, the Other Reader and I remembered all the people who have joined the book club and then after a few years, or after many, have left, moving to Hong Kong or London or Toronto or New York. We have lost them one by one, though not entirely. They remain part of the story we tell ourselves about this strange little community built around books.And this cloudy Sunday morning, I sit at my desk with muddled emotions: a sense of triumph at the student protests and an unease about what comes next. Will things work out for the students? Or will everything simply return to what it was before?It feels melancholy that nothing lasts, not book clubs, not ministries, not momentum. Except that one thing does last, and I am grateful for it: the words. The songs, the epics, the poems—they endure, they come back.A man returns home after twenty years of wandering the world, and his story is told aloud, in verse, in print, on screen. And a cockroach still complains, a hundred years later, on a million phone screens.And you, dear reader, what poem or line has stuck with you longer than you'd expect?(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and Founder, Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. For all questions about life and literature email sonyasbookbox@gmail.com)