How to read a book
1: Curled up by the window, looking out occasionally to watch a sentence unfold, once, twice and again, until you know everything it meant to say.
2: In waiting rooms, salons, bus stops, toilets, friend’s houses as they take calls, alone at lunch, while pretending to listen, while pointedly ignoring, with your toes dipped in water, as mutton curry simmers slowly- skimming pages to fill empty pockets of time with meaning.
3: In a delicately managed fast and slow rhythm- eager to get to the last page and afraid that the book will end.
4: Like a failing relationship. Each page is punishment but you plod through because you’ve read so much already and you’re hoping pg.158 gives you a reason to go on.
5: With a half-smile, because you and the author share an inside joke.
6: In florescent highlights gathered over three readings, to offer a glimmer of light on a dark day.
7: In 2005, cut off from the news and spoilers, in synchrony with your best friend chasing pages right down to their end, in time to dissect, delight and despair in your favourite childhood book before anyone else can tell you Dumbledore dies.
8: Like peering into an old memory and finding people you once knew, in a book you once loved.
9: In transit in an airport, where words settle inside you along with impressions of scurrying feet, the scent of someone’s hot dog, a fading announcement and a woman whose sleeping child occupies three empty seats.
10: Tenderly. Like a Vikram Seth poem about mistaken smiles.
11: With a touch of sorrow, a beloved childhood author cancelled in 2017, 2018 and 2021.
12: Leaving dog ears, food stains and bent spines in a trail that leads to you- the first reader, the destroyer.
13: Like a premonition warning you of authoritarian governments, privacy theft, zoonotic viruses, sex robots, a twister, biochemical warfare and the fact that everyone’s famous for 15 seconds.
14: Through the advantages proffered by a library membership and a library card.
15: With your feet dangling off your bed, your body limp, your book forming a roof over your head and you a house, living within it.
16: Like you’re learning what words mean and how sentences could be strung to mean two things at once.
17: From a second-hand book where you find a photo of a girl and her mother on a lake, in a motorboat shaped like a duck with ‘trip to Kodai, ‘96’ scrawled at the back. And you wonder who read the book, the girl or the mother?
18: In a place where the cushions, the light, the breeze, the window, the beverage, the air, the sounds and the silences cooperate to bring you The Perfect Spot ™
19: Like a writer, reading to write.
20: Like a child.
