This weekend in Portland brought in a pleasant surprise in the form of a real-life, feel-the-smell of books kind of an experience; a large book store namely, Powell’s. The encounter had multiple shades of feelings. Foremost was the intensity of walking across aisles of book-shelves that is fast disappearing from our lives; given e-books, Amazon, kindle, and even newspapers on phones rapidly re-place books printed on paper. Deprived of the smell and feel of newspapers in my new realities of life in the Bay Area, I am getting used to reading Times of India, New York Times, Malayala Manorama, Hindu and Wall Street Journal – all of them on an iPhone! Powell’s made me realize the alienation between people and books printed on paper.

Shortly into my exploration I realized Powell’s carry both new and old books, on a massive scale, and survived Amazon, despite being a stand-alone store. Old books are a deep influence on me. I grew up using old books of a student who was a year ahead, studying in a high school where my sister used to teach. Those books were Gods, no end and no beginning. So seeing used books on the shelves of Powell’s was nostalgic. Then came books that I read in college, and have been wanting to re-read to discover newer meanings. Reading something when you are at twenty and reading it in mid-forties are two different experiences. Books are meaningless without the reader attaching meanings to them. Those meanings evolve over time. Just as everything else in life.

Some of those books, the theory of Justice by John Rawls, Immanuel Kant’s original works, Radhakrishnan’s work on Upanishads; seeing them all again in paper, as new and old, sitting on bookshelves, was an exhilarating experience. University life, conversations evenings after evenings, brings a strange sense of familiarity about authors who you read in classrooms. Not just their names, their thoughts and life become familiar. Powell’s has several floors of books organized in color-coded sections – red, orange, purple, green and more and a pearl room that carried rare classics. Shelves have the names of authors, names that have left indelible impressions in me as a student: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida; and from contemporary times, Francis Fukuyama (End of History and the last man), Ronald Dworkin (Taking Rights Seriously, Robert Nozick (State, Anarchy and Utopia), and more. India has banned a bunch of books. The Reminiscence of the Nehru Age by M. O. Mathai, Seymour Hersh’s the Prince of Power, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Powell’s had them all.

The many experiences with books – page dividers, small notes you make as you read them, those passages you underline with blue ink, a little fold you make as you close, a date and place insignia, and a hand-written note to a friend if you feel like gifting it…the sheer feel of writing by hand, those ink-pens, the pencils, the sense of niceness when you re-organize a collection of books, dust them, put them back on the shelves – all that Powell’s brought back.

The alienation from paper makes the morning train on the East Coast with a copy of New York Times and a cup of coffee (decaf Americano with raw-sugar?) more intense. Last month back in New Delhi, a much needed weekend at home, I picked up, yet again, MT Vasudevan Nair’s legendary Malayalam novel, Randamoozham. As I opened the cover page, I saw a seal: PS Devi – year 1984. Ammayi (my aunt who’s no more who was a deep influence in life) had bought the book the same year MT published it. I put a tape across its ageing cover to keep it together. The other book that needed the same treatment was OV Vijayan’s Khazakhinte Itihasam given my inclination to re-read it year after year. Out of curiosity, I searched for English translations of Vijayan’s novels at Powell. I could only find one title.

As I walked out of Powell’s to its Couch street exit, there stood a pillar that had Mahabharata engraved on it, in Devanagari, next to names of Greek and Roman classics. A reminder of times when manuscripts of world classics used to be written on palm-leaves. Later on a plane back home, the gentleman sitting next to me explained how nice it is to read from an iPad Pro. Contemporary times has brought in newer nuances to reading. We no more see that many people reading a paper-book, turning pages, marking up, at airports, train stations, public parks, coffee shops. A sense of alienation from the smell and feel of books, book-shelves and libraries is in the air. That alienation, as if it is about to happen to me, made this weekend’s visit to Powell’s a soulful experience. Thank you, Matt Brock.