Prose and Cons?

I don’t know her name, and I probably never will. But I do know that she’s really close to her cousin, Samaira. I don’t know her name, but I do know that she read 30 books last year and she’s looking to hit 35 this year. I don’t know her name, but I do know she’s back in Bangalore from the US and is spending time with her grandmother. 

How do I know all this? No, I didn’t interview her. We aren’t mutuals on Instagram, either. I just took a trip to Blossoms Book House to find myself a copy of The Book of Everlasting Things, and instead, I found her. Or rather, her voice found me. From three aisles over.

There’s something purely magical about a bookstore. It’s supposed to be a place of quiet contemplation, but if you listen closely enough, it’s actually a theater of the human experience. While most of us are there to find a new world to disappear into, we often end up giving away a lot about our own. 

This girl, apparently a 21-year-old, was truly the human embodiment of a highlighter pen. Bubbly, loud, and quite happily uninhibited, she narrated her life story to the entire third floor while in deep conversation with her friend (who did not say a word), as if she were recording a voice memo for the universe. Every book she pulled out from the shelf seemed to trigger a memory of a specific flight from the States or a conversation with her grandmother. She was the bookstore’s accidental Main Character, making the dusty air feel a tad more electric, just by existing at a volume that high. 

As I moved toward the Indian Authors section, her voice drifted into the distance, and all I could hear was the rhythmic sound of someone stacking hardcovers. The atmosphere was decidedly more pondering, if I had to put a label on it. There, I encountered another bookstore regular: the performative males. Usually found between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, they have a way of holding a book (usually a particularly complex post-colonial critique or a deeply niche translated work) that suggests they aren’t merely reading, they’re conversing with the great literary minds of the country. I watched one of them adjust his glasses and tilt the spine of a Penguin Black Classic ever so slightly, ensuring any passerby could appreciate his refined, intellectual taste. It was a silent performance of depth, a careful curation of the “literary man” aesthetic. It was a silent signal to the world: “Yes, I am exactly the kind of person who reads this.”

Eventually, my wandering led me to the “New Arrivals” table, where the silence was broken by a crisp British accent that cut through the air like a sharp page turn. A woman, seemingly in her 30s, was talking to a friend, her phone held out like a compass. She wasn’t scrolling through her social media, though; she was religiously updating her Goodreads. “It’s the only thing that got me back into it, really,” she whispered with a focused intensity. For her, the joy of reading was also linked to the satisfaction of the digital checkmark (guilty!) She spoke about her reading goal with the kind of reverence we usually reserve for sacred texts, treating it as a personal mission. She was not just someone. She was every one of us who has ever felt lost in the digital noise and has used a simple tracker to find our way back to the quiet magic of a story.

My eyes shifted to the shopkeepers, navigating the narrow corridors with stacks of books balanced precariously in their arms, and it occurred to me that they are the ultimate silent audience of this daily drama. It’s quite ironic how, while I’m just visiting this “theater,” they live in it. They probably know more about Bangalore’s dating scene, family feuds, and intellectual pretenses than a town hall meeting ever could. For them, eavesdropping isn’t a hobby; it’s an occupational hazard. They move through the aisle like stagehands, likely hearing Samaira’s name for the tenth time that hour or coming across the same brooding guy that hasn’t actually turned a page since lunch.

By the time I finally found the books on my list and headed toward the billing counter, I’m sure Samaira’s cousin was likely already halfway through her next life update, and the boys in the Indian Author section were likely still going over the same paragraph for maximum effect. 

While we come for the stories bound in ink and paper, looking for a way to escape our own lives, aren’t the most captivating ones actually the ones floating through the air in a random, dusty aisle?

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• books
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• reading