Reading, Interrupted

One morning, I visited the footpath library at Flora Fountain to exchange cash for a paperback and snuggle it into my bag among other belongings. Without much thinking or browsing online book catalogues, I bought The Idiot by Elif Batuman. When was I going to read it? Did I know anything about the author? Did I have the patience for a 422-page novel? All these questions remained unasked, unanswered. It was an act of comfort like all other book-buying. I lay out the premise to underscore how I come into possession of books without careful consideration, with gleeful abandon, because it’s just who I am, accumulating paperbacks and post-dated warmth in exchange for cash on heritage footpaths, and elsewhere.

More often than not, I find myself in front of a small screen, mid-sized screen, big screen, or gigantic screens of digital ads in which politicians smile so wide that it is shocking they have anything to be pleased about. I was and I am tired of looking at screens. Sometimes, even reading on my Kindle seems unappealing. In any case, I didn’t care too much for the plot of The Idiot, virtual stars or not, but trudged through the 8-point font size, not fearing for my already-compromised eyesight.

My attention span has gone to hell on a handcart, and I am using the same dopamine-riddled social media that ruined it to get advice on how to fix it. I am not looking at my phone as soon as I wake up, touching grass as it were, and taking up chores that are required to be done by hand. I am, once again, reading long books as a salve on the bruises inflicted on my mind by the unceasing scrolling, and return to the slower unfolding of events on pages with time to reflect between sentences. Reading and reading a lot are my two favourite things in the world, followed closely by writing, green spaces, and the hoarding of coloured pens, in that order. The influencers tell me that reading at night is a better way to drift off to sleep than plunging your nervous system into a blue screen whirlpool of hell. I started reading The Idiot before bedtime as a ritual, zipping through 30 pages on some nights, while on others barely made it past three.

Reading an unknown book I’d bought on a whim is not an act of rebellion against the attention economy, though it started that way. It was exasperating at first, tedious at times, carefree in its atmosphere, and sunny in its outcomes. After all, it is a story about being young, and it has a quality of being untethered that reminds me of the easygoing of college students.

Holding the thin, seemingly pirated pages of the paperback, and pulling apart the unsure binding of The Idiot felt as if the story was in my hands and despite its lack of plot, the book was communicating with me. The everyday excursions of the main character Selin, who narrated her life to me from these flimsy pages, seemed childish and inconsequential at the beginning; the lack of emotion in her narrative was questionable at best. I picked it up every day, reading as much as that day’s capacity allowed me, wondering why Selin was as interesting as a white cardboard, and wondering if the story was really about her friend Svetlana, who was unpredictable and had a sparkle. I found Selin’s obsession with Ivan, a tall Hungarian senior who wrote her cryptic emails in the middle of the night, puerile and charged with the energy one reserves for enigmas, except I did not perceive Ivan that way. All of this notwithstanding, I plodded on because bedtime rituals should mean something even if life is uncertain, characters are not who I expected them to be, and youth was still wasted on the young.

As I went about my days, ticking off the adult things that modern society has convinced we should do, I was irritated by Selin’s naiveté, but I also wondered if she had it better in her 20s, whether we all had it better in our 20s. (Of course, we did.) I thought about Selin, not as an obsession, but because 422 pages is a lot, which gave me a considerable time to mull over her life from the outside. Days and days of living with a book does that to you, and all readers know that we live in bookish worlds which take up residence in our minds. Years later, we might not remember how the plot unfolded, but we remember how a book made us feel.

Slowly, I started to defrost; the mould of expectation I had for this reading began to give way. I stopped looking at the size of the novel. I abandoned the monthly reading goal assigned to me by a mobile app. I acceded to the absence of a traditional plot and resigned myself to this infatuated mess of a college diary about a boy, and, possibly, about fabulous Svetlana. I reached into myself and removed the barriers that the social media had laid in me for the experience I was about to have.

Around me, the world carried on as it always does, and perhaps, as it had never done before. Roads were demolished in my city at a furious pace, AI was cheered on once again, children were killed, and the vertical scrolling of our zeitgeist continued. I read more books alongside The Idiot, drank one too many cups of peppermint tea. I bought cold-processed soap from an online store, which came wrapped in parchment-coloured paper and smelled of cinnamon and oranges. I unwrapped the soap and used the perfumed wrapper as a bookmark in my copy of The Idiot. I spoke to a friend who said that reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey made huge demands on his attention span, and we discussed how our minds are now wandering gypsies within the entrails of the Internet. I told him I am reading a 400+ page book to cure said attention span. He admired my courage. I counted the length of a twilight and went to the gym in the early morning heat. I worked harder and faster. I sat in silence.

I got distracted.

I found myself, willingly, in a debate in the comments section of Instagram. A book-influencer said that Invisible Women wasn’t diverse enough for them, and that’s why it wasn’t a good book. I thought that books were not qualifying for entrance exams in universities abroad. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that our stories must encompass a collective human experience. Stories should be about everyone, but not everyone needs to be in the same story. I said what I thought, and comments upon nested comments piled on; people jumped in either to defend the book influencer or to agree with me. For a little while, my Instagram notifications were such a mess that I stopped adding to the discourse in 6-point font. It was not good for my eyesight.

All of this while Selin continued to have an unglamorous take on her life, and I continued to partake in her vacant observations on the grounds of Harvard. It was strange to view the world narrated by a character with such insipid thoughts, but she had great self-awareness that she had insipid thoughts.

Long ago, I’d unsubscribed from comparing myself with others’ reading challenges, which turned reading into a public act of attainment. I don’t want to quantify my reading or check off diversity boxes in a book. I want to return to my younger days of reading, where I would climb a wooden flight of stairs to enter a low-ceiling library and borrow books as a secret adventure for my mind. I don’t want to worry about the percentage completed on the bottom right corner of my Kindle or the number on the centre bottom of a page. I don’t want to be productive with my literary escapades. Unguarded and endowed with trust in storytelling, I want to enter into words that would offer me a glimpse of our shared humanity, love of the Earth, and the chaos of being alive. I don’t want to psychoanalyse why Selin finds a twenty-five-year-old man’s emails about space and the interiors of the cafeteria fascinating. As far as I was concerned, it was her business. I wanted a story without having to go into an analytical and social dissection (not that anything is wrong with these spirited discussions). I set aside this social-media afforded need to slice open every text into intersectional babble and fell into a quiet friendship with this girl who was having a moment with a boy.

I do not remember having these pressures when I read The Sisters — the first story of Dubliners — a decade ago. I held the purple, smooth paperback in my hands and read the story over and over three times, thinking I had missed something. I turned the book around, read the blurb and looked for a clue on what it was supposed to mean. Re-reading The Sisters made me feel like the story wriggled out of my reach each time I read it. But as I turned page after page after page, the “whole point of it” was made clear to me like a revelation from the divine; in this case, it was Joyce. And then, I suspended myself in Dublin, into the world of Joyce’s imagination with no handles to hold on to, no story spine to lean on.

I am not comparing Batuman to Joyce, but I find her plotlessness gnawing at me, and at the same time, I knew I wanted this storyline to follow a pathway I had presumed based on how characters are “supposed to behave”. And this is exactly the kind of reading experience I was trying to shed. In my notes from when I read Dubliners, I found that I had written the following. “I was liberated from [that] bondage; story after story I realised that there was no closure.” This is the feeling I am seeking — to be free of the bondage that modern-day Internet discourse has put on literature.

While reading The Idiot, I thought a lot about this need for everything to be placed in a way such as to cater to an audience primed by pop culture discourse on the Internet. I don’t want to be wired by technology such that I expect literature to meet my expectations of it. I believe that literature is a reflection of our times and a respiration of the times yet to arrive, and we must let it keep its mystery. I extended this courtesy to Selin and suspended my forecasts for her and her love interest. Every evening, I dimmed the lights, moisturised my hands, applied some lip mask, and entered this aimless mess of a woman’s life much the same way I stepped into Dublin ten years ago.

Towards the second half of each year, I invariably come across listicles that have ‘short books’ so readers can meet their reading goals. I have read many of these books, and some are rather lovely. All of Claire Keegan’s work falls into the arms of a sunbeam on an Irish winter morning. And I can’t say I am a big fan of all the books that hover in the whereabouts of Japanese cafes, cats, and bookshops. It takes all kinds, is what I am saying. But this trend worries me because if we collectively lose our ability to engage with the long form, the meandering sentences, and misunderstand the “economy of words”, what else might we start to surrender? There are Internet communities where people read the tomes of literature together over one year — War and Peace, The Arabian Nights (1001 Nights), Middlemarch, Anna Karenina — and members congregate weekly or monthly to slowly read and appreciate these giants. Instead of labelling this as a resistance to the “attention economy”, I find this as an online equivalent of finding people who have the same interests as you do.

Though I am a member one of these groups, I also find that most of my reading experiences are so tumultuous that they are my own. I cannot imagine reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in a group, but maybe such a reading can be done. However, I have tried and failed. That experience is an intimate, personal experience, even if solitary. In 2021, I started reading The Railway by Hamid Ismailov but abandoned it because it beguiled and badgered me at the same time. It has haunted me for all these years. I wondered what happened to the characters of the chaikhana in Gilas. When I read it again this year, it was fascinating at the beginning and a punishment towards the end. I knew it was going to be an absurd novel. After all, I had read it before. The Railway is compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude in its own Uzbeki-fever-dream-kinda-way, and it did fairly well in the theatre of my mind until it didn’t. I was hobnobbing with Ismailov’s inventive and eccentric characters. I was sashaying in their mohalla’s gullies and markets, and Central Asian highlands and plains. I was listening to their gibberish, in part sibylline, in part full of shit. It was an excursion devoid of an end in mind. But after a point, it had me holding on to the sides of the novel, asking for something to fall in line, for a shadow without a doubt, for the screeching to come to a halt. It always happens this way. Would I recommend it to you? Absolutely.

In 2016, when I told a friend that nothing happens in Herta Müller’s novel The Appointment, he asked me to re-read the book and sent me a long note saying that Müller’s nothingness “is the void within which everything exists, and to love nothingness is to love everything, albeit in a safer kind of way”. This stayed with me, and I quote it verbatim because I have those words saved to this day. When I think about this nothingness in stories while I am on the train or doing my chores, I know that time is still ticking for those characters no matter how much writers tend to freeze their tales in a day, in a graduate college education, or a revolution. I know that no matter how much Selin tries to shy away from decision-making in her own life, someday she will have to. Perhaps it won’t be for me to witness.

I am aware that wrestling with storylines is not a reflection of my attention span, because books make readers feel a myriad of emotions as they should. I know it is not giving up. It is, perhaps, a reflection of me being human, of wanting a clear beginning and an end. Theologically, all humans have a definite start and a finish, and in the middle, we are “free” to discover our greatness, equilibrium, and ineptitude. We are also expected to fill out forms. I seek certainty in life; it helps with the anxiety, I am told. It also helps navigate life’s important questions. What am I supposed to say when I meet a tall Hungarian man? How does one climb out of one’s mental dungeon while being under house arrest? What should I do in the face of the banal evil that surrounds us in modern-day India?

Despite its lack of plot, in the second half of the book, Selin goes to a Hungarian village to teach English to Hungarian school children. By the time I had reached these pages, I was able to feel the texture of her life. I was familiar with her as a person, and by now, Ivan had somewhat become a collective mystery (for me and her). Svetlana continued to remain intriguing, and other interesting characters, such as Roszna, started to arrive. Besides, dawdling in a Hungarian village was helping me navigate my apocalyptic city. The book had my contemplation, even if it did not have my heart. I was in for the long haul, no matter where it would take me.

Eventually, I became fond of Hungarian villages. I threw away a postcard studded with seeds into the dry trash and wrote to the commissioner of my municipality. Not about the postcard, of course. I painted my nails with a transparent varnish and found that they were still breaking on no account. The skies started to become cloudy, and on some days during my commute, I was able to see my city’s silhouette clearly; the pleasant sunshine falling on emerald leaves and grey buildings in the distance. Out of habit, I took aesthetic photographs of the books I had read this year. I realised I already had a picture of The Idiot from a silent reading session I attended in a park. I missed my village and figured that’s what summers are for — eating mangoes in the shade of large ancestral trees while time passes by ever so languid, ever so mellow. Maybe Selin had gotten something right, even if she wasn’t privy to Ratnagiri mangoes.

After I finished reading The Idiot, I took two pictures of it to save the sentences I wanted as a keepsake. In one of these sentences, Selin says that her aunt’s home city is multilayered, heterogeneous, like the ones described in nineteenth-century novels. When I read that line, it made me miss living in a city. Ironical, because I supposedly live in one. A loss I suffered had been surfaced by a stray line in a book. I missed what Mumbai used to feel like, the promise it had, its undercurrent of hope shimmering even in the most derelict places. I was able to verbalise the diminishing optimism and absence of sparkle that abounds in my city. The second sentence describes Selin being disappointed in her first year of education, and how she had learned nothing at all in Philosophy or Psychology of Language. From time to time, books I have read return to me in this manner, disguising themselves now, and rematerializing later.

I visited the footpath library to return the book and to make space for newer stories on my already-stacked bookshelf. When the seller gave me a new book in return, I removed the parchment-coloured paper from The Idiot. He told me that putting “all this” inside books spoils them. I said it was a bookmark. He said that is what I have made of it. I asked him if there was a bus stop nearby, and he pointed out the obvious for me. As I walked to the stop, my city lay before me — desolate, covered in rubble, and weakened.

I saw a bus leaving when I was a few metres away. I almost broke into a run to catch it, but stopped myself. I did not want to remember myself as a woman who runs after ramshackle buses in her dilapidated city. I wanted to be someone who had just returned from a Hungarian village, parted from an unlikely girlfriend, and was going to write about the puzzling experience. Legions of citizens take to the innards of this city with decayed strength and an inconsistent twinkle in their eyes. Like all the shine from the stars, this twinkle, too, comes from a land far away, a life far away.