Notes From The Newsstand
In defence of print, jasmine, and the small rituals we keep pretending we've outgrown.
There is a newsstand near my grandmother’s house in Fort that has been selling the same magazines, in the same order, for as long as I have been alive. Femina at eye level, Filmfare below it, a stack of Stardusts you have to squat for. The man who runs it does not remember me, which is its own small comfort — some things are allowed to simply continue without needing to know your name.
I bought one last month, for the first time in maybe ten years. Not because I needed it. Because the act of buying a magazine — choosing it, paying for it, holding a thing that asks for one kind of attention at a time — felt like a small rebellion against the way I usually read now, which is to say: everywhere, all at once, never finishing anything.
It cost eighty rupees. I read it in a single sitting, on a train, with jasmine in my hair that I had not put there myself — my grandmother’s doing, pressed in that morning while I complained. It was, and I know how this sounds, the best afternoon I’ve had all year.
I don’t think print is better than the internet. I think it asks for something the internet never will: that you sit still, hold one thing, and let it be enough. Jasmine does the same. So does a bindi pressed on before a mirror you’re not photographing. These are not big rituals. They are the small ones we keep pretending we’ve outgrown, and then come back to, a little embarrassed, a little relieved.
“It cost eighty rupees. I read it in a single sitting, on a train, with jasmine in my hair that I had not put there myself.”
End of story. Filed under Culture.
