The Morning Paper: Sixteen Pages, No Notifications

I saw him every Tuesday for about a month before I actually noticed him.

He was always at the same table, the one near the window that caught the thin January sun, a small cup of tea steaming beside him and a newspaper open flat on the table, held down at the corners with the careful habit of someone who has done this for decades. 

An older man, winter cap still on despite being indoors, a walking stick leaning against the chair beside him.

What stopped me, one morning, was the pen.

He was reading with a pen in his hand, moving it slowly along each line, underlining things as he went. Not frantically, not the way you highlight something on a screen to come back to later and never do. Deliberately. Like someone taking a thing seriously.

I watched him work through what must have been four or five pages. He didn't look up. He didn't check his phone, which sat face-down and apparently forgotten near the tea. When a waiter came to refill his cup he nodded his thanks without breaking his reading, the pen still moving. 

The café was doing its morning thing around him, the noise and the orders and the scraping of chairs, and he was entirely elsewhere, inside those sixteen pages, absorbing the world at his own pace.

I thought about my own mornings. The notifications that arrive before I'm fully awake, each one dressed in the language of urgency. Breaking news, political drama, someone's opinion on someone else's opinion, market updates, outrage, cricket scores, more outrage.

By the time I reach the office I have consumed a great deal and understood almost nothing, the way you can eat quickly and still feel empty.

He finished eventually. Folded the newspaper with the particular neatness of someone who respects the object, tucked it under his arm along with his winter cap and the walking stick, left a small tip on the table and walked out into the Delhi morning without any apparent hurry.

I don't know what he did with the rest of his day. But I know he had started it properly, unhurried and attentive, having actually read the news rather than merely survived it.

I've been thinking about that pen ever since.