What is an ideal bookmark? A childhood-photo of the love of your life? A hand-painted strip of thick paper from your sister from a time when she was stationed at art as her passing hobby? One that the bookstore cashier inserts into the book in a magnanimous gesture of goodwill, but in reality manipulating you to return and shop more because you’ll be reminded of the store everytime you move ahead in your current read – what a brilliant marketing strategy, Don Draper would be embarassed for not coming up with that idea. Why do you need a bookmark when the pages themselves can be used for this purpose? Dog-ear the pages away, who says its cruel, books are inanimate objects. It’s the most practical method, leaving the book like a weary traveller after endless days of walk.
I don’t dog-ear my book pages. At least not after I have found a book mark. In the beginning, if I really want to start reading and snuggle with the book and want to pause and do not want to walk around looking for a suitable bookmark right away, I do go for the most practical method. My heart does not break at that. Books do not feel pain. And I do not feel the pain, unless it is a borrowed book and in that case its more about making sure I don’t annoy the owner into never lending me a book again.
Sometimes when I want to pause reading, I try to use the page number as a book mark. In a bus with a book and no bookmark? Not feeling like dog-earing? Page 264. That is 2 and then 6 minus 4 is 2. Remember that relationship which doesn’t really qualify to be an equation. That is where I stopped. Does this method work? I can’t remember, I’ll observe the next time I use it and report.
When am reading on a plane there is an obvious candidate for a bookmark. The Boarding Pass. There is a symbiotic relationship between the two, like an egret picking flies off a cow. To ensure that I don’t lose my boarding pass while lounging impatiently in the gate area, I place it inside the book I plan to take on the plane. The book gives a safe space to this strip of paper that suddenly becomes the most important thing for me in the next half an hour or so. And once it does its job and gets me across that machine which turns a red cross into a green tick and opens its heart to let me in, the boarding pass downgrades itself and assumes the role of a bookmark. In the artificial air inside an airplane, full of people being treated with superficial royalty just for chosing to head somewhere in life, the book and the boarding pass become an unlikely couple suddenly belonging together and making perfect sense.
Naturally, this mostly happens with books that I buy in airports. But this also happens with those bought on the ground, but just by chance happen to accompany me on a flight trip. Today I began reading a book I bought at Calicut airport when I was flying back to Germany. I hadn’t read it a lot on the plane, because I was busy watching Modern Family sipping on Gin Tonic before passing out for four hours. And so when I was looking for an optimal book mark for this one, I decided that there could be no better choice than the boarding passes for the flights that took me across the oceans on that trip. I was missing one, but the remaining two have now settled into ‘Martyr’ by Kaveh Akbar, that the DC Books shopkeeper at Calicut airport convinced me into buying at 2 am on a Saturday. I was impressed by his commitment to the noble responsibility of keeping the population well read on the latest written content in the world.
Aside, I am wondering if I write like the book I am currently reading? Yes. If I had written this blogpost two days ago, it would have sounded very different. I’d have sounded more beautiful, and warm, and filled with a human coziness because I had been reading the last pages of ‘Conversations of Love.’ But here we are. Is it bad that I don’t have a writing identity that is well-defined and unique? Well, I think I actually do have one. Like ‘the beautiful smile on my face’ that the men who swipe right on me point out, there is something niche about the way I write. Only, ironically, I don’t have the words to describe what that is.
Alleys 