When disorder sparks joy

Books are, after all, objects too, valued for their aesthetic and sensory affect

When my wife and I moved to Delhi from Washington, DC, in the summer of 2012, 21 of the 23 boxes we had shipped over comprised only books. Many of them had survived since I had left Kuwait as a 17-year-old in 1994 through stints in various countries and cities. A couple of months ago it looked as if those same books might not make it through another move, this time a few hundred metres down the road from our old flat to the new one we had just rented. My wife, reasonably, and not just because she had been