By Anubhuti Jain
Some of my most beautiful memories aren’t the big ones. Not birthdays or milestones. Just afternoons. Flat on the floor, a book open on my stomach, light slanting through a window and that specific stillness of a house that isn't asking anything from you.
I don’t remember when I started loving books. It feels like they were just there—like air, or background music. I’d pull comic magazines from my mother’s almari, the pages already softened by time, and sit there cross-legged, flipping through panels and stories I probably didn’t fully understand. I just understood the feeling of disappearing into them.
In school, the library felt like a rationing system. Only so many books allowed. I remember borrowing with more than one library card—I don’t even know if that was allowed, but the need to take more home was stronger than the rule. Finish one world, begin another.
I traveled with The Famous Five before I knew what wanderlust was. I learned darkness could be funny through Roald Dahl. I grew up in parallel with Harry Potter, waiting for the next release like a personal milestone. Then in my teenage years I read Zoya and felt something new. Not just the story, but a longing. A flutter.
There are novels I associate with specific places and seasons of my life. I remember driving to work while listening to an audiobook, gripping the steering wheel as a paragraph unfolded so heartbreakingly that I arrived in the parking lot in tears. I remember reading 1984 and feeling a quiet unease about the fragility of truth, or encountering alternate histories like The Man in the High Castle that asked unsettling questions about how differently the world might have unfolded. I wasn’t in wartime Europe. I’ve never lived in Seoul under occupation. And yet when I read Pachinko or The Nightingale, I felt like I had stood there.
Somewhere along the way, I fell in love with used bookstores. Narrow aisles, uneven floors, and that smell—not just paper, but a soft, dusty sweetness. There is something intimate about a pre-owned book. The faint crease on a spine. A name written in the front cover. Someone else’s thumbs turned these pages before mine. They paused where I am pausing. Maybe they underlined the same sentence that made my breath catch. I’ve begun choosing pre-owned copies deliberately now. It’s a quiet act of continuation. I’m stepping into a long, invisible chain of readers—carrying a story forward rather than beginning it alone.
Now, I watch my daughter flip through pages with that same seriousness. She pauses at illustrations, building worlds in her mind that I cannot see. When I hand her a book, it feels like a key. I wonder which stories will shape her the way mine shaped me. Which characters will become her quiet companions. Which paragraphs she will remember years later without realizing they never truly left her.
There is something profoundly luxurious about lazing around with a book. In a world that rewards productivity and visible accomplishment, reading asks for stillness. It offers companionship without demand. Some people return to places to remember who they were. I return to pages. And each time, I find not only a borrowed world—but a clearer understanding of my own.