So, I read a book

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Waiting at an overpriced beverages counter in Bombay airport, I heard my friend S's voice. "I knew I would run into you at an airport some time!". Our extra delight at a routine coincidence may be related to the fact that we both see the world through something-coloured glasses through which coincidences look like movie scenes. May our glamorous tribe increase.

Almost right away, S began telling me with voluble excitement about a book he was reading. I also got excited hearing about it. Our "accha?s" and "yes!s" rolled like peppercorns through the sludge of airport acoustics, until overcome, S thrust the book at me. "Take it". "But you're in the middle of it". "Ya, but I can't wait for you to read it. I'll get another". Convinced and pleased, I took it.

Perhaps you share my difficulty. Like many, I've struggled to actually read books for some time, the mind frittered by digital life. Had I not received the book in this delighting fashion, like someone giving me half their truffle pasta, I might not have started it right away. And even so, it may have languished half-read in my teetering to-read pile. But, by a stroke of luck, I fell sick.

Unable to work, I lay in bed, wrapped in a quilt, wrapped in the cocoon of monsoon light, wrapped up in the book. At first I read fitfully. I kept taking photos of lines I loved and sharing with friends or posting on Instagram. Then the book faltered, and my excitement with it. But involved, I kept reading. In that committed relationship through marvelous and less-successful parts, I stopped thinking "about" it to others, and started thinking along with the book.

A friend and a viral infection helped return me to a sweeter rhythm. To reading a book for no purpose, to a solitude made luxurious with velvety silence. Our solitude now is always noisy - not just with phone notifications but the jangle of pre-determined meanings. We are supposed to read and see something because it is "important" "brave" or some such word of pompous signification.

But so much of this is not coming from the individual critic's sense of love and encounter with meaning. It is based on the hierarchy of film festivals or the din or marketing or the dull duties of political worthiness. Making us attend to it is more about maintaining those hierarchies and systems than pleasure for itself. It's a kind of enslaved time pretending to be free time, a ceaseless public intrusion into our private, poetic life.

People ask: did you see or read such and such person's film or book. Then there is the predictable theatre of rendering opinion, and the clatter of being judged or slotted accordingly. People hardly ask, "what are you reading nowadays

If people are lonely, it's not because they are not with others. That noise makes it impossible to hear yourself think - and if even you won't listen to yourself then could there be a lonelier loneliness?

I touched down on Page 452 replete. S had said, "I've decided I won't talk about the book on social media, only to friends." And so, I too won't tell you the name of the book or recommend it today. Yaniki, I suggest, why don't you ask your friend to lend you a book they think you'll love.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com