Pages Per Rupee
, 3 min read
As a kid I bought books by the page count, because that was the only way I could afford them. A school library and a best friend since LKG did the rest.
I never had much money for books, so I bought them by one rule, pages per rupee. My literary philosophy was arithmetic. A thin book was a bad deal no matter who wrote it, and a thick one was a good deal almost regardless of what was inside.
That rule is how Tom Clancy got into my life. The Bear and the Dragon was well over a thousand pages, and nothing came close. I bought it for its thickness, finished it hooked, and then read everything he had written, in order. The same rule brought me to Malazan. The first one I owned was Reaper's Gale, the seventh book, because it was huge and I could afford it. Starting the Book of the Fallen at book seven is a terrible way to meet Malazan, and a very Malazan thing to do. I went back to Gardens of the Moon and read the series properly from the start.
A lot of my books came secondhand, including some of the best hardcovers I still own, heavy, well-made books that were far too good for what I paid. I learned to love a good deal and a good binding at the same time.
Reading turned into an addiction around 7th or 8th standard. My first books were bought with money I had saved, so every one of them was a decision. My sister brought me books from a stall in Pala, and for a kid counting every rupee, that felt like being handed something precious for free.
The school library did the rest. Gotham Comics got me into Marvel and DC. Doctor Who reached me through the books long before I saw the show, so for years my Doctor looked like whatever my imagination decided. I read every Jules Verne I could find, and I still like a story better when it makes me curious about how something works.
Books were also where I went to get away. They let me forget home for a while, and the pain and sadness that came with growing up.
One of the first books I borrowed from that library was Leon Uris's Exodus. I read it as a heroic book, with heroes, a cause and a clear line between good and evil, and I loved it. Years later I saw how one-sided it was, and how much of its heroism depended on who it chose to leave out. That was uncomfortable. It was also the first time I let myself change my mind about something I had loved. I have kept doing it ever since. Every so often I go back to something that shaped me and look at it with older eyes, and if it doesn't hold up, it goes to the discard pile. That habit sits at the centre of how I read now. Loving a book once doesn't mean I owe it forever.
And there was Alex, my best friend since LKG. Thirty-six years that asshole has been in my life now. We read everything we could get our hands on, and we ran a barter system with an actual economy. A cool enough book could fetch two in return, and we negotiated those exchange rates with the seriousness of a trade delegation. "I'll give you this one, but you have to give me two." I don't think either of us ever felt cheated. We just wanted more to read.
Harry Potter got to me first, but The Lord of the Rings reached me the other way round, through a theatre screen before a single page, and fantasy was never the same for me after it. It gave me most of my non-negotiables, in books and out of them. Kindness isn't optional. The smallest person in the room has value. Power is no excuse for being an asshole. Coming home after an adventure to a simple life is something to celebrate. And a book should feed a sense of adventure and belonging, and leave my thinking a little higher than where it started.
The ending is what got me. Frodo fails. At the very edge of the fire, after everything, he cannot let the Ring go. It is destroyed anyway, because hundreds of pages earlier he chose to let Gollum live, and that small mercy comes back when everything else has failed.
The book that shaped me more than any other is the one I never paid a rupee for. Alex bought it because of The Fellowship of the Ring film, read it, and passed it to me.