In a second-hand bookshop, a quiet ritual of friendship

Whether it's regular lunches with buddies, treks, museum visits or golf, ritual calms us and offers us comfort in an unsettled world.

- Rohit Brijnath Assistant Sports Editor

On tired shelves the books stand in crooked lines, as roughed up by time as we are. The piles are unruly, untidy, like life itself you could say. Nothing is in alphabetical order and yet this chaos is beautiful.

A ritual is unfolding. I'm in a secondhand bookshop with two friends and it feels like we're entering a literary ark. Something precious is being preserved here. Every bookcase has promise, every shelf a treasure. It feels like I'm rummaging through my grandfather’s cupboard. What dusty surprise will emerge from the past?

Where have these old books travelled, who bought them, where were they read? On a train, under a streetlight, in a hospital? They belonged to someone else, yet they were also written for me. As my finger slides across the shoulders of books I am in effect tracing the spine of my life.

Alistair MacLean, Louis L'Amour, Mary Higgins Clark, D.H. Lawrence, Andre Brink. If my life has a soundtrack - Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen, Adele - then the books are part of my script.

My friend PR stands with me in Crime, her husband SH has gone wandering into History. We're in Bengaluru on a road studded with secondhand bookshops to which we have together come for our annual pilgrimage. A chuckling God has decided the address is Church Street.

We shuffle past shelves, tug at books, look at stories and tell each other some. Every tale we volunteer is a further peek into each other. SH read Isaac Asimov, I refused to flirt with science fiction. We pause at old favourites and wonder if a reread is worth it. Over the years the same book has a different taste. PR insists I buy Olive Kitteridge, I ask for The Narrow Road To The Deep North for her. Humans separated by preferences but bound by words.