I spend a scandalous amount of time in bookstores — more than I’d care to add up, and certainly more than is reasonable — wherever I happen to be. This is true for Delhi, where I have the fortune and misfortune of having set down my roots, and true of every other city and country I find myself in. My wife, who is usually my travel companion, disapproves quietly — I suspect — but never says so.

The habit has left me with three things: more books than I can read in several lifetimes (being Hindu by birth has its uses — I’m promised a few more lifetimes to get through them); a working knowledge of covers, titles, and blurbs, from having gazed at, glanced past, and occasionally lost an entire afternoon to several hundred thousand of them; and, lastly, a fairly settled sense of what makes a good bookstore good. (I’ve day-dreamt, several times, about becoming a book advisor to these stores and customers, but I doubt that pays though I don’t mind being paid in old paperbacks.)

It is also, I should admit, a refuge — better than drink and/or narcotics, probably, though I suspect I’d sleep more soundly with almost any other vice.

The trouble with this one is that it doesn’t calm the mind so much as set it ricocheting and spinning; books are not an escape from overthinking but its most reliable and potent fuel.

And yet the same habit that unmoors me also grounds me. I find a familiar author, an idea I recognize, and feel — at least briefly — tethered to the world as it is, rather than adrift, the way a kite is adrift, or a boat, or some unlikely boat-shaped kite-thing, blown across the sky or sea without having agreed to it, or even known it.

So it isn’t only refuge. It’s a bid for control. Like a lost extraterrestrial returning to its cute home pod for a boost — or, more plausibly, your AirPods needing a charge.

One more thing has come of all this: a library of over a thousand books, chosen less by any developed taste or strategy than by the randomness of glance meeting a particular way of stacking books, by biases, by moods, and by a few other private angels and monsters of mine — all of which provide a clearer window into the state of my soul than I could have written myself: its usual share of darkness, the occasional streak of light, and, I’d like to think, a glimmer of hope.

Well, hopefully……