I’m not a ditherer like Hamlet. Nor do I have mood swings, but it’s been almost two decades since the Kindle was launched, and I’m still not quite sure what deserves more votes: physical books or e-readers.
It’s just that as I grow older, my needs constantly change. I confess that when the Kindle made its debut, I gave it a Roman Emperor-like thumbs down. “I love the smell and the feel of paper,” I insisted, “Kindles are cold and metallic, whine, moan, etc.” Apart from the emotional argument, I had practical considerations too: I only ever had to paint three walls in my rooms because the fourth walls were concealed by packed bookshelves with no breathing space — physical books helped me save money, and their spines added cheerful splashes of colour, yay.
When my sister bought her first Kindle I regarded her as a traitor. No, I did not shriek, “You wicked anti-national, go to Pakistan!” as is the peculiar practice in “new” India, but I did feel she had done authors a disservice, because there’s nothing that turns on an author more than seeing her/his book on a shelf. I had already written two books by then, so I took it personally. I grimly stuck to physical books and pointedly averted my eyes when my sister shamelessly flaunted her Kindle.
A few years later, my jaw dropped when I saw my sister reading without her spectacles. “Jesus saves, or did you have laser eye surgery?” I squawked. She looked smug. Unbearably smug, and shoved her Kindle under my nose. The point size was super large, even I could read it without my spectacles. “You can adjust the type,” Her Unroyal Smugness said. And just like how in those sweet old-fashioned romances the girl first detests the boy, and then suddenly falls in love in with him, I developed a mad crush on the Kindle and ordered one immediately.
See, I have been wearing prescription spectacles since the age of eight, and I still hate how they make the bridge of my nose feel sweaty, and the way the spectacle arms jab the sides of my skull. I switched to contact lenses in my teens and spent less time partying and more time crawling on the floor looking for a lens that suddenly fell out of an eye. Very often, I never found the fallen lenses at all, and it turned out to be a rather expensive proposition. I wisely switched back to spectacles when I had to earn my own keep. Which is why when my very first Kindle arrived, I flung my spectacles aside and sang its praises daily. Needless to say, my sister rolled her eyes like an insolent gum-chewing teen.
I didn’t give up physical books, though. I had both, and still had to paint only three walls in my rooms, and I was happy. Till my husband and I started moving from city to city, and rented house to rented house. Our collection of books weighed more than several well-fed adult elephants, and the owners of the packer & mover company we employed earned enough from us to educate their children in the US from Kindergarten onwards. But we loved our books, and it was worth transporting them because just seeing them around made rented flats feel like home.
Till the time we literally broke our backs during a shift from one flat to another in the very same complex. Trucks were not allowed in, and the packers used wheelbarrows to transport our books to the flat in C block. Yes, wheelbarrows, not even grocery store trollies! They had only two tiny wheelbarrows, so it took all day. By night fall, they had put the furniture in place but left all the books scattered on the floor. My husband and I literally broke our backs putting our books on the bookshelves. Then we paid a grand sum to a physiotherapist for a home visit. While lying in bed groaning over our aches, we decided to donate 99.9 per cent of our books and keep only the ones we absolutely could not live without.
I, of course, kept all the books I had written, and about 200 others including Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, and my mother’s copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass gifted to her by “Aunt Margaret, February 1951, Sierra Leone.” It goes without saying that we had stiff drinks the day the books were taken away. We got over it eventually, Dear Reader, and when we next moved house, we got down on our knees and thanked God for the Kindle.
Things are changing again now. The harsh glare from lap tops, smart phones, iPads, e-readers, etc has left us with blurred vision, watery eyes, and frequent visits to ophthalmologists who prescribe eye drops that we’re frightened to use. We haven’t forgotten the articles we’ve read condemning and banning certain brands of Indian eye drops across the world. What we’ve forgotten are the names of the manufacturers, so we play it safe and avoid all. We’ve limited our screen time drastically and our bookshelves are blooming like colourful spring flowers again. Lovely, but not so lovely when I remember that our next house shift is a month away.
