No more sharing

OK, so who has my book? ‘Do you mind telling me where my copy of Rebecca is?’ I demanded of my sister late one night.

‘I think someone has borrowed it,’ was the reply.
‘And hopefully that someone has a name?’ I shot back.

My sister sighed. ‘Look, I have no idea who has it. That someone has never bothered to return it. All we can do is think of all the people who borrow books from us and ask them if they have it. How come you suddenly remembered Rebecca at this unearthly hour anyway?’ It was my turn to sigh. Book borrowing is something all book lovers thrive on and relate to. In a city like ours, where there is a persistent dearth of public libraries and where prices of cell phones go down faster than that of reading material, borrowing books is the only decent way to get your hands on or devour a wide variety of books. And come to think of it, it happens to be a lot of fun too. There is something entirely satisfying about going into a friend’s house empty-handed and coming out with an armful of books.

The same notion extends to shopping for books. Whenever a fellow book lover and I shop together, we never buy the same books. ‘Hey, I have that book already. Don’t buy it. You can borrow it from me when I’m done reading it,’ is a much heard-of statement at book fairs and stores. And so the process goes on. The so far undefined rules of book borrowing are akin to stating the obvious. It goes without saying that when you borrow a book, you read it and return it at the earliest opportunity—simple, right? Wrong!

As simple and obvious as the given rules may be, they are regarded in much the same league as the timings on wedding invites. Hence there are only a very few people who actually honour the fact that the book they are reading is borrowed, and that one fine day they should or will have to return it.

This leads me to classify book borrowers into three very distinct categories. Let’s start with the most positive category: the ‘dutiful borrowers’. These borrowers, as the name suggests, follow the rules meticulously. They keep a very good track of which book they have borrowed from whom. They also take very good care of the books they borrow. And they make it their top most priority to read the book at their earliest and return it. And yes, they expect the same consideration from the people to whom they have lent their books. It goes without saying that these poor souls are often disappointed.

The cause of their disappointment is sometimes people who fall in the next category of borrowers who can be aptly termed ‘lethargic borrowers.’ These borrowers are ones who have impossibly hectic schedules, but are still keen on reading good books. Hence, they borrow books extensively but, owing to a very hectic lifestyle, they can only manage to read a page or two everyday. Now, don’t get me wrong. I realise that today’s life is fast paced; everyone already has a lot on their schedules, and it’s not that easy to make time to read books in a short span of time. It’s understandable that most people can only manage a couple of pages daily. The point is that if you lend your book to a lethargic borrower, there is some hope that the book will come back to you one day even if it takes up to six months for it to finish.

At least in the above two cases your books are returned to you. The third category of the ‘lost borrowers’ comprises of people to whom if you lend your books; they have an excellent chance of getting lost. Yep, these lost borrowers borrow books with extreme enthusiasm and line up the borrowed books on their shelves and forget all about them. Sometimes, the book borrowers even forget who they had borrowed the book from.

If you are a dutiful borrower and keep track of these lost ones, try asking some of them to return your books — they will give you their most woebegone expressions and tell you very sadly that they have not ‘yet’ had time to read the books they borrowed. They will then ask to keep those books for another year probably, and even at the end of that year they will be no close to actually opening the said book. Yes, it is actually a lost cause.

An extension of the lost borrowers are the soulless borrowers. They will enthusiastically lend out your books to their friends or relatives, without keeping track of which book they gave to whom. You will only find that out when you ask for the books. At such times you can only hope that the people who now have your books belong to the dutiful category, otherwise you can just forget about seeing those books ever again.

So there you have it — a neat categorisation of those who borrow books in order to fulfill their thirst for reading. These categories are by no means exhaustive. One can actually write a whole book on them. However, these are the categories I have made after experiencing all three types of borrowers and having agonised over lost books, some of them being the books received as prizes from my school days.

Now I must go figure out who has my copy of Rebecca and Maps for Lost Lovers.