After having written this piece, I remembered the line ‘Ishq hua, to aane lagi Tehzeeb!’ from the song ‘Ajeeb-o-gareeb tarqueeb lagaye naseeb, ajeeb-o-gareeb.’ It is fromt he movie Azaad.
If you read it till the end, you will know what I am talking about.
She read like most people breathe.
He… didn’t.
Not because he couldn’t. He could quote Newton, noodle and tax forms just fine. But something about books made him suspicious. All that binding. That stillness. That weird, papery smell.
“They trap time,” he’d say.
“They reveal time,” she’d reply.
By a strange stroke of luck, they met at a bookstore. Not because he wanted to, but because the coffee shop he actually liked, shared a wall with her temple of worship, lined with spines, stories, and sighs.
He noticed her first. Sitting on the floor between shelves, cross-legged, flipping pages like they were secrets meant just for her. She noticed him too; leaning by the glass divider, trying very hard not to look like someone who had wandered into the wrong dimension.
“What are you reading?” he asked, unsure why he was asking.
“Nothing you’d like,” she smiled, sure he wouldn’t.
Still, she told him. And somehow, she told him again the next week. And again, over coffee, over rainy walks, over quiet evenings.
He didn’t start reading.
But he started listening.
She talked about plot twists like they were personal betrayals. Cried over fictional deaths like they happened next door. And described literary villains with such loathing, he once blurted,
“Tell me where he lives. I’ll deal with him myself.”
He was kidding. She wasn’t. Her books were her people.
One evening, she left a book on his kitchen table. A short one. With a post-it that simply said:
“Try. For me.”
He groaned. Rolled his eyes. Ignored it for two weeks. Then picked it up. Just to prove her wrong, of course.
Three pages in, he chuckled. Five pages later, he was still reading. By the end, he texted her:
“Okay. That was cheating.”
She replied: “Nope. That was reading.”
He didn’t turn into a bookworm. But he started keeping one, just one, on his bedside.
And once, when he thought she wasn’t looking, he was seen rereading a line and smiling to himself.
She never said “I told you so.” She just handed him another book.
That’s how love works sometimes. Not by changing who you are, but by handing you a story you didn’t know you needed.
Kahani Hai Na Amazing?
To the trained eye, the song is apt for this post. To the untrained eye, well, fall in love with a special someone who loves books – Tehzeeb aane lagegi 😊.
Remember: Padhna Zaroori Hai
PS: The idea for this post was contributed by Anshika Mishra. But is the post written for someone else? Keep guessing.
If you have reached this far, discover the mystery of the Stories in the Bath.
Want to know what happened under the Champak Tree? Here, have a look and let me know.