The Wet Newspaper

 

Waking up to rains in the morning is nothing less than a dream come true for a rain lover like me and no I’m not exaggerating even a bit there. Especially in the months of July where I get desperate to see it pour, it feels like waking up in heaven after having gone to sleep on this planet a few hours before. However, all through my growing-up years, the only thing that succeeded in spoiling my mood as I stepped out in my balcony was the sight of a wet newspaper. It was akin to stepping on a pile of dung right at the gate of heaven. Now you’d think that’s an extreme reaction for something that is on my doorstep every day, right? Let me tell you why that extreme emotion.

For years, the newspaper meant the world to me. I began my day reading it. Anything could change in my world but this little bit about the beginning of my day wouldn’t. On days when it would rain and I would have to wait for hours to get to read the dry newspaper, I would grow mad in my head. On many occasions, I didn’t even wait for the newspaper to dry. I’d try reading it as it is which often meant parts of it got torn while turning pages. In fact, I would be like a fish taken out of water when I would visit my grandfather’s place in Bengal because as a young child I couldn’t read Bangla and the newspapers that could be found in my village were all in that language. The evening on which I would return to Delhi (It was always the evening since the train arrived in the evening), the first thing I’d do would be to collect all the newspapers still in those rubber bands and start reading them one by one.

In fact, on the weekends, when I was home, I wouldn’t open my eyes until I knew that my father was done reading the newspaper and it was to be mine from the moment my day begins. The days on which I would be able to get hold of the newspaper before my father were extremely rare but felt like winning the lottery whenever they happened. On weekdays when I had to go to school and had that small window of 40 minutes to get ready and leave for school, I’d get my 10 minutes with the newspaper before my father could get to it as part of some unwritten agreement. Needless to say, it wasn’t his favorite arrangement but he made far bigger sacrifices for his son to flinch on this daily little compromise. Also, he knew he had enough hours to read through the entire thing before I returned at 2 and sat with the newspaper for hours to read it thoroughly.

As I have grown up, I have tried to understand the reason behind this craze, and the digital age that we are in currently has helped me to put things in perspective better. Growing up as an introverted kid in a house with a portable Television for entertainment with just the national broadcaster’s channels on it, the meaning of ‘new’ for me was quite different. Life moved at a slower pace and the ‘new’ trickled in very slowly. Unless some major events took place in the course of the day, the news on television would look pretty much the same at the end of the day as it looked at the beginning of the day. There were fewer new releases in terms of movies and albums and that meant that the radio channels were dominated by the same music for quite a few days. Moreover, at a personal level, I was a shy kid with not too many friends who didn’t go to school a lot. That only made the feeling of my every day being similar to the one gone by stronger.  

In this little world of mine, the newspaper was not only important. It was precious. It was a portal to the ‘new’ that I so dearly wanted. Before I could start travelling, something that I began only in my college years, it was my everyday portal to explore the vastness of the world I was a part of as I would spend hours reading it. And the fact that it didn’t cost me more than what a few toffees would cost made it all the more special as on days I wouldn’t find it in my balcony, I would go out myself to buy it. Needless to say, such days, where the newspaper arrived late began on a torturous note for both me and my father.

Even after we moved away from the national broadcasters, we could never grow warm to the idea of the 24-hour news channels and always looked at them with skepticism. (When I say ‘we’ here, it almost always means my father whose habits and opinions I have naturally aped all my life.) We still trusted the newspaper the most, believing that it gives or at least tries to give us a balanced view of the ongoings around us. It’s not that we didn’t have our disagreements over this thing that was close to both of our hearts. There was a point when I wanted to switch to the Indian Express, largely because it had the articles by Bharat Sundaresan, and my father being the beautiful man that he was agreed to it reluctantly. However, my father, a teetotaller with no addictions, I realised in those weeks was fairly addicted to his daily dose of Hindustan Times with the morning tea and we eventually switched back to it.

Then came the smartphone. The advent of the mobile phone didn’t change my father’s relationship with the newspaper. In fact, it didn’t affect my newspaper reading habits too in the beginning. Gradually, though, it combined with multiple other factors to change my world and because of that, my relationship with the newspaper. My world expanded in the coming years and instead of a handful of things to keep me occupied, I had a lot of them. The newspaper did remain an important part since I only grew more curious as I grew up but it began to lose in front of fast internet connections. The newspaper articles didn’t come with links like the internet articles did and the explorer me didn’t have to stop exploring just where the article ended when I was reading them on a screen. Also, college years meant that those rare wins of picking up the newspaper first also disappeared as I had to wake up late for my classes. I’d still come back home to read the newspaper in its entirety in the evening.

But that also changed when I began working. I didn’t have the time to begin my day with the newspaper and by the time I returned home, it almost seemed obsolete. That was largely because I was consuming news and information through my smartphone now where every 15 minutes, I’d get a notification of a new news story, even though it was an update on how much Taimur shat on that day. The new now no more came through the newspaper once every morning in my life as it was once. The new now trickled in with multiple notifications every hour throughout the day.  Moreover, since I have worked on multiple projects for much of my work life, I was always jumping from one job to another even it meant starting the new one at 9 in the evening. That’s how the time to read the newspaper began to disappear from my daily life, even though I knew well how different consuming news from a newspaper and a mobile app was.

Soon, the newspaper just became something that I saw my father read every morning, a sight that used to sadden me after Mumma left since she would often be sitting on the other side, listening to him as he updated her with all that was going on in the world. Moreover, looking back, I feel it also affected my relationship with my father as now we were not beginning our days reading the same things. Hence, things to talk about also began to shrink. After Papa left in April and I turned work into my favorite escape, the barely-read newspapers kept piling up in a corner of my balcony.

Then one day in July, after making me wait for what seemed like ages, rains booked an early morning date with my city. As I stepped out and saw the happy faces of the rain-drenched plants in my small balcony, something nudged me from inside. For the first time in years, I hadn’t dashed to recover the wet newspaper. For the first time in all my life, the sight of the wet newspaper hadn’t made me sad.

And that made me sad.