"This is a great book!" says Bins. "You must read it." I'm trying to concentrate on getting together a packet of papers. "Don't disturb me, please," I say. I've got to apply for a visa to Europe because I'm supposed to attend a conference in April. Some people are good at filling up forms. I am not. The only parts of any form that I like to fill are my date of birth and full name. Why? Because these are the only bits of my life that I am absolutely sure of. Everything else is uncertain.
"But it would change your life, this book!" insists Bins. I lift my head up. "You're not even reading it!" I say. "You're only listening to it on Kindle!" He shakes his head. "No! Not Kindle. Audible. It's from Google. Really great. You would like it." I can't tell whether he means I'd like Audible, or audio books in general or the contents of this particular audio book. "Please! I'm trying to remember whether my permanent address is a philosophical question." Who has a really permanent address, after all? Even if you're chained to the floor in a maximum security cell, serving out a life-sentence, you will eventually cease to exist and thus leave that address behind.
"It's called LAB GIRL. By Hope Jahren. She must be very beautiful. Like a leaf." This last statement is so weird, that I have to stop filling the form. "What the hiccup are you talking about?" I ask. Naturally, he can't let that pass. "Hiccup? What hiccup?" he wants to know. So I have to explain, laboriously, that I am trying to avoid all forms of profanity, even such harmless words as "heck". Meanwhile on Page Three of the form I'm trying to fill there's a question about whether or not I've ever visited Europe. In case I have, it wants me to list all the dates, times, and places I went to while I was there, restaurants I ate at, beds I slept in, diseases I contracted, drugs that I sold, weapons of mass destruction that I smuggled in.
"The way the author describes a leaf," explains Bins, "is so beautiful that it makes me thinks she must also be beautiful." My mind meanwhile is full of angrily buzzing thoughts. I can barely hear a word of what he says. Yes, I know why visa forms are designed to be like torture chambers for the mind: it's to prevent undesirables from traveling across international borders. Sadly, however, these forms are designed by the very people they're trying to keep out! Torturers!Murderers! Terrorists! I give up on the form and listen instead to the audio book Bins wants me to hear.
"Leaves make sugar," says the author, reading her own book out. "Plants are the only things in the Universe that can make sugar out of non-living inorganic matter. All the sugar you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf." I have to agree with Bins: "The author must be very beautiful," I say. I can always fill up that hiccuping form some other time. "Let's go out and hug a leaf. Let's adopt a forest." Thank goodness for authors who can remind us of what really matters in life! Leaves. And sugar.
Manjula Padmanabhan , author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column
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