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The Greatest Book Ever Written – Subroto

Mukerji

He had searched for it all his life…the greatest book ever written. He
had read frantically, haphazardly, desperately, dementedly – read like
a man possessed. He had read every book he could lay his hands on.
That had been his lot right from the time his mother had taught him
the alphabet as he sat in his little plastic bathtub with his rubber duck,
long before he learned to walk. Then she had put him through his
paces with two- and then three-letter words, introduced him to a world
full of cats, bats, rats and dogs who stared back at him from the wall
poster. She would stand by, ruler in hand, ready to whack him if he
went wrong, but after some time she discarded it. He never went
wrong.

That was around the time she introduced him to colourful little books
full of nursery rhymes, and his terminal illness began. He just couldn’t
get enough of the rhymes like the one about the silly egg who fell off
the wall and couldn’t be put together again, about the cow who
jumped over the moon and, as the little dog laughed to see such fun,
the fork ran away with the spoon. He was reading, absorbing,
understanding…understanding that books were living things that
meant different things to different people.

His imagination flared as he read the nonsensical little verses. They

were so beguiling, even though he knew the rhymes described an
improbable universe. Then he changed his mind; they depicted real
worlds as seen and sensed by the men and women who had written
them. The fact that a writer could create a world as real as the one he
physically experienced slowly sank into his wondering brain. Now he
saw books as vehicles to another reality—a reality that was as tangible
as the one he lived in. This epiphany changed his worldview.

He stopped deriding fictional works he did not like, understanding that

the writer had created a universe that did not quite suit everyone. The
greater learning involved here was writers were creators. Now all
books were sacred to him, sacrosanct. It was up to him to choose the
ones he liked and not run down the ones he didn’t. He realized it was
his fault he did not like a book. It was not the book’s fault that he did
not have it in him to appreciate it, or to grasp what it was telling him.
With humility came a craving to understand them all, and go on to
locate the greatest one—the greatest book ever written.

He always knew when he wanted to read a book. It was like the hunger
that burned within him around mealtimes, when his little body craved
nourishment. His craving for books was as real as the one that gnawed
at his vitals. Books were food for his mind, and that hunger was
insatiable. He devoured every book that called out to him.
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There were so many of them around him, stacked row upon neat row,
bookcase after bookcase lining corridor after corridor of his home ―
books that had once belonged to his cousins, his father, uncles, and
their forebears, books that went back generations. He found two fat
hardbound books, one red and the other green. One had fairy tales by
the Brothers Grimm, and the other contained the little fables of Aesop.
The cheesy old pages crumbled in his hands as he fed his hunger.

When he stumbled onto the treasure trove of LIFE and Time

magazines, he looked at the pictures, trying to make sense of the
captions. There was a picture of a general called Eisenhower wearing a
helmet, this photograph showed a jowly, bulldog-faced man with a
cigar stuck jauntily in his mouth, holding up two fingers to form a V;
that photo showed a liner called the Andrea Doria in her death throes,
listing heavily to starboard as she sank beneath the waves.

The world was a much bigger place than he’d thought it was. He made
up his mind to roam the world through books. It was about then that he
found a series of travel books by a man called John Gunther, the titles
always beginning with the word ‘Inside’…Inside Russia, Inside China,
Inside Germany… Books, he discovered, were a dimensionless
experience. Time and distance did not hold sway over this world.

He kept reading as the years passed—wildly, indiscriminately,

irrationally, unquestioningly, madly—bolting the rich fare the way a
wolf takes his meat. Gobbling it greedily, hungrily, wantonly, stuffing
himself like a schoolboy inadvertently locked into a tuck shop…
reading, always reading—reading as if there was to be no tomorrow,
reading as if his life depended on it…

Writers spoke to him across the centuries in a babel of tongues. They

were all his teachers, and he recited their names reverently …
Plutarch, Plato, Aristotle, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gorky,
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Hardy, Bronte, Austen, Blyton, Johns, Orwell,
Huxley, Asimov, Einstein, Planck, Cloete, Kropotkin, Bentham, Mills,
Defoe, Pyle, Verne, Corbett, Masters, Hemingway, Rousseau, Hugo,
Blackmore, Scott, Tennyson, Buck, Spinoza, Rider Haggard, Twain,
Kipling, de Maupassant, Khayyam, Wilde, the Apostles, Bunyan …

There was a man who called himself ‘M’, the hagiographer of a mystic
known as Ramakrishna, there were Solzhenitsyn, Marx, Maugham,
Seth, Shute, Cowper, Conrad, London, Cronin, Hilton, Carter, Joyce,
Dalhousie, Chew, Hazlitt, Durrell, Palgrave, Crane, Henty, Ouida, St.
John Macdonald, Conway, O’Connor, Tapply, Trueblood, Moss, Bader,
Taylor, Bronowski, Capra, Chanda, Zukav, Morse, Weiss, Smith,
Burroughs, Carlson, Eastman, Hailey, Uris and Ahluwalia.
There were Dalvi, Bonnington, Bannister, L’Amour, Brand, Grey,
Yoganand, Chidbhavananda, Chekhov, Churchill, Galbraith, Deighton,
le Carre, Doyle, Christie, Carnegie, Wells, Pahalniuk, Balducci, Adams,
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Huntingdon, von Daniken, Koontz, Poe, Queen, Fitzgerald, Shaw, Kafka,

Lee, Salinger, Kerouac, Steinbeck, Heller, Johnson, Tzu, Pratchett,
Paine, Jefferson, Tolkien, Clancy, Whitman, Irving, Wilkie Collins,
Heinlein, Thackeray, Tucker, Brown and Segal.

There were Wharton, Rand, Lamb, Follett, Vonnegut, Baum, Douglas,

Mitchell, Puzo, Messner, Crichton, Ondaatje, Melville, Henry, Clarke,
Wodehouse, Francis, Blake, Bradbury, Bach, Ludlum, Heyrdahl,
Hawking, Dumas, Harris, Woolf, Sartre, Nobokov, Niven, Alcott,
Wallace, Stoker, Brinkley, Hartmann, Hilary, Hunt, Bodsworth, Carson,
Stevenson, Cervantes, Marquez, MacLean, Charteris, Adamson,
Sholokov, Hesse, Stanley and a thousand others who had left their
thoughts with him even though their names had evaporated from his
memory.

He read all the books in the school library and hundreds of volumes at
college. He read every book he could lay his hands on. There was no
such thing as spare time for him. He loved books and he read them on
trains, in buses, in airplanes, in hotel lobbies, in the bathroom, in
between jobs. He read incessantly, voraciously, insatiably. In time, the
books coalesced and became as one in his mind. But as the years sped
past, he became increasingly dismayed, for he was no closer to finding
The Greatest Book Ever Written. Where was the one book that said it
all, the book he had searched for all his life?

The world became gray and faded, a little tattered around the edges,
dog-eared and yellowed, crumbling to dust like some of the older
books in his collection. He was tiring now; he was well over sixty years
old now, and his stamina and memory and eyesight had begun to
leave him. He worried he would not find the book he sought before he
died. On a sudden impulse, he decided to ask the Goddess – Naina
Devi herself, for this last boon. She had given him so much, but had
withheld this last favour. He wondered why she had not granted him
the boon he craved above all else. She had even given him the
daughter he’d hankered for, and he’d named the lovely child in her
honour.

It was spring, and he lay in the shade of an old oak tree overlooking
the green expanse of Nainital Lake. Far below, he could see the tiny
insect-like shapes of boats as they shuttled back and forth endlessly
over the smooth green surface of the water two thousand feet below
him. Beetles buzzed around the rhododendron bushes and little robins
hopped fearlessly around his supine form, pecking at invisible crumbs
of bread that had fallen from his sandwiches. The torpor of the June
afternoon and the scent of wild herbs made him drowsy…

When he awoke, he was surprised to find himself fording a river. The

terrain looked familiar. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if this was
Tumaria, in the heart of Corbett National Park. He decided to ask the
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first man he came across. Then he remembered that it was highly

unlikely that he’d come across another human within a hundred square
miles of this wild spot. This was tiger country. Moreover, tourists rarely
came here at this time of the year because of the heat.

Strange, how he remembered Tumaria so vividly. It was unchanged,

even though forty years had passed since he’d last seen it. Odd, how
his legs were getting stronger at every step. He waded energetically
through the raging current, waist-high, and surged out of the water
onto dry land. He could clearly make out individual trees way out to
the west where the boulders gave way to green jungle. That was when
he spotted the shepherd and his flock of sheep…

He remembered a day long ago, in the distant days of his youth, when
he’s gone trout fishing on the Beas, in the Kulu Valley. There he had
come across a shepherd whistling to keep his sheep huddled together
as they went along the right bank in a compacted mass. He had always
been good at whistling. Quickly mastering the tuneless tune, he had
whistled the sheep into a milling mass. They couldn’t make up their
minds which whistle to heed. It had been a teenage hijink, but it hadn’t
gone down too well with the shepherd, whose livelihood depended on
keeping the sheep safely by his side.

But this shepherd was different. He didn’t whistle to his sheep, he just
spoke to them in a low tone. When the Seeker came up to the man, he
was surprised to find that he knew English. “The Book…” the grazier
asked sympathetically. “You haven’t found it yet, I suppose?”
“No, I haven’t. But how did you know?” he asked.
“Oh, it’s my job to know such things,” said the shepherd.
“Just who the hell are you, anyway?” asked the Seeker suspiciously.
“I’m called the marg darshak, by heaven – ‘The One Who Shows The
Way’. And I will show you The Way to the Book.”

The Seekers eyes narrowed. “Oh you will, will you? How nice of you!
Ever read a book yourself?” he asked a trifle annoyed at the man’s
presumption.
“No, I never learned to read. But it’s said that many books have been
written about me.“
“Really? I find that a little hard to believe, you know. You’re just a
shepherd. Why would anyone bother writing a book on you?”
The shepherd smiled. “People who find their way to what they’re
looking for often end up doing just that”, he offered mildly.
“Can you tell me where I can find the book I’m looking for?” asked the
Seeker.
“Of course! You need to get in touch with The Librarian.”
“The Librarian? Which librarian?” asked the Seeker, puzzled.
“The Librarian”, said the Pathfinder, grinning.
“And where do I find him?” asked the Seeker.
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“Follow me, and I shall show you The Way”, said the Pathfinder
gravely. “Those who follow me are never lost.”
“Well, you’ve lost me there, Pathfinder. A fine book by the way…by
James Fenimore Cooper.”
“He got the idea of the story from me,” said the Pathfinder mildly.
“Oh he did, did he? And I suppose you sat down to Cakes and Ale with
him after that?” asked the Seeker irritably.
“Somerset Maugham. Very dull book. He just wouldn’t listen to me,”
reminisced the Pathfinder.
The Seeker’s jaw dropped. “You know Maugham! But that’s the most
preposterous thing I ever heard, coming from a man who admits he
can’t read.”
“I don’t read books; I read men” said the Pathfinder softly.
A chill went up and down the Seeker’s back. ‘I wonder whom I’m I
talking to,’ he thought.
“Follow Me, and I will show you The Way,” said the Pathfinder, more
urgently this time. “Those who follow Me enjoy Life Everlasting.”
“My God!” The Seeker was stunned. “That’s from the Bible!”
“God? Near enough! Besides, I told you men have written about Me,”
he pointed out. “Follow Me. I will show you the Way to The Great
Librarian.”

It was high up in the mountains. Well, not exactly in the mountains but
beyond them, on the Other Side. He went through a narrow pass, like
the eye of a needle. He had no difficulty negotiating it, not being a rich
man. He wondered what failing to squeeze through the gorge had to
do with being rich. The bulging pockets got in the way, he guessed.

A magnificent city lay shimmering in the distance. Even from where he

stood, he could see beautiful structures, the likes of which he had
never beheld. One towered above the rest. “In my Father’s House
there are many mansions…” the Pathfinder told him. The glittering
city seemed to draw him unto itself…

The gates gleamed iridescently in the sun, as if made of Mother-of-

Pearl. There was no one about so he walked through unchallenged,
making a beeline for the imposing structure. He walked into a cool,
brilliantly lit hall the size of a football field, and ascended the winding
staircase. There were no elevators that he could see and, in any case,
he felt fitter than he’d felt for decades.

He stood stock still. The entire floor was a vast library. A sea of books
stretched all the way to the horizon. Even he, who had read all his life,
was flabbergasted. ‘Why, every book ever written must be here!’ he
thought, cowed.

“You are right. Every book ever written is here…except the one you
seek, My son.”
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The speaker was an older version of the Pathfinder. He wore a simple

homespun robe and there were sandals on his feet. Now he gestured
at the books all around them. “Even one such as you has read only a
tiny fraction of what is preserved here. The book you seek is not
here…in a way. To find it, you will have to make a journey with Me.”

He took the Seeker’s hand and led him out onto a sunbeam and they
were off. The dark of outer space, he saw, was illuminated by the light
of millions upon countless millions of stars. They left the Milky Way far
behind as they headed out…’Where, I wonder,’ said the Seeker to
himself as he clung tightly to the strong old hand that held his so
lovingly, possessively. Star systems loomed up out of the distance and
fell away behind them like so many towns along a railway track.

‘We’re going faster than light,’ said the Seeker to himself.

‘Theoretically, it’s impossible.’
“The speed of thought is faster than 186,300 miles per second,”
explained The Librarian. “Your science is beginning to glimpse the
truth of this. Great Masters of the East not only know of it, they know
how to harness it. There is a lot Western scientists can learn from
them.”
The Seeker nodded, “Yogananda’s book talks of the Law of Miracles.
It’s a beautiful exposition of applied Relativity and quantum
mechanics.”
“The trick is in knowing how to use them,” remarked The Librarian
dryly.
“I know, Librarian,” acknowledged the Seeker humbly. For all his
bookish knowledge, he felt utterly inadequate in the face of cosmic
truths.

They had stopped. The stars had petered out. They were poised at a
distance from Everything Else. Far away, the Seeker could see a faint
glow where he guessed Creation to be.
‘I ought to be scared, but I’m strangely at peace,’ he thought to
himself.
“Fear not, for I am with you, even unto the end of Time,” assured The
Librarian gently.
“But where is the book I seek, Librarian? Didn’t we come all this way
just to find it? I don’t see it anywhere!” ventured the Seeker petulantly.
“Seek and ye shall find. Knock and it shall be opened unto you,”
reminded The Librarian. “Now listen well to The Secret…there is only
One book that meets your requirements. In other words, it makes all
other books redundant. There it is!” said The Librarian, pointing
straight ahead.
“I…I don’t understand, Master,” said the Seeker miserably.
“Look, My son! You have got used to thinking of a book in terms of
paper, DTP processes, printing presses, computer algorithms, ebook
readers, and so on. If you see a book in any other form you do not
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recognize it. How very sad!” The Librarian shook His head mournfully,
grinning from ear to ear. He was enjoying Himself vastly.
“That’s the book?” asked the Seeker pointing out, thoroughly
mystified.
“If you look closely, with your heart, you will learn its secret,” assured
The Librarian.

The Seeker looked. He looked out at the vastness of Creation, at What

Was and also at What Was Not, at everything that had ever been and
would ever be … and it finally dawned on him.
“The Book of Creation,” he whispered, shell-shocked. “The Book of
Life itself! Man has searched for it for ages!”
“Yes. Good. You can see, after all,” said The Librarian, proud of his
protégé’s insight.

It took the Seeker time to recover. Fortunately for him, Time meant
nothing here.
“You wrote it!” said the Seeker, awed. “The Greatest Book Ever
Written! Of course! How stupid of me!”
“Not stupid. Just disoriented. Besides, I didn’t write it,” said The
Librarian.
“You…you didn’t write it? But then…then…who did?”
“YOU DID, NEALE!” rejoiced The Librarian. “YOU WROTE THAT BOOK
FOR YOURSELF! Go back to your early insights for clues about what a
book really is. Now enjoy this one. It’s The Greatest Book Ever Written.
YOU WROTE IT FOR YOURSELF. And you have all eternity in which to
read it.”
“Thank God!” said Neale fervently. It was a biggish book, even for him.
“You’re welcome!” said The Great Librarian as He read along with
Neale…

© Subroto Mukerji

This story is written for – and by– Neale Donald Walsch.

‘He moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.’