Around the world on a paper boat

Whenever I think back to all the different kinds of paper I’ve known, I feel happy

September 15, 2018 04:08 pm | Updated 04:08 pm IST

 Photo: Getty Images/ iStock

Photo: Getty Images/ iStock

The other day I was browsing in an art store, looking at different kinds of paper, and I found myself wondering how long it would be before paper disappears from our lives. I don’t think paper will ever disappear entirely, not in the lifetime of anyone reading this right now, so I suppose my question was how long before paper stops being so ubiquitously present?

Growing up in the 1960s, paper ruled one’s existence. Everything revolved around paper, from the ration cards and the dozen basic government and bank forms that anyone above the poverty line had to fill in duplicate and triplicate, all legal documents and police FIRs; leaving aside the coins, money, of course, was made of paper, as were books; entering primary school, notebooks were made from paper and they were covered again in brown paper for paper name-labels to be glued on to them; middle-class essentials and fripperies both were also dependent on paper, normal letters, post-cards, inland letters and international air-mail letters, invitation cards, wedding cards, greeting cards, wrapping paper for gifts. As a consumer of the limited items available in early post-Independence India, you engaged in paper, card and cardboard of different varieties; the daily newspaper was, of course, made from paper and you saw the whole cycle daily, as you got your street food in a paper thonga festooned by last month’s headlines.

Home of paper

In my family, paper perhaps had a greater importance than in many other households. My mother was a professor in a college and one of her quarterly rituals was to set exam question-papers and bring back a stack of string-tied answer-scripts in which students had wrestled with those questions. My father had his own small business — dealing with textiles — but his real work centred around paper: he was a writer and he would write his books in cheap, squarish, unlined notebooks, send them off to his publisher in Ahmedabad, receive proofs printed on letterpress, and then later the finished books, obviously made of paper.

To be involved in the world of letters was to dedicate a large cubic footage of your (usually quite limited) living space to the storage of books and literary magazines. The first two things my parents would look at, whenever they moved from one rented flat to another, were the kitchen and the bathroom, but the third thing was where the bookshelves could be placed or built, with the fourth being the availability of natural light for the writing desks.

Colour crazy

At some point I began to get hooked to drawing and painting and that brought a whole different universe of paper into my life. From the hated drudgery of the lined school-books (‘This work is very untidy! 4/10!’) I moved to dealing with the textures of the beautifully blank pages of drawing books and loose painting sheets. Here I could be messy, make mistakes that made me happy, discover crazy new things by slapping together poster paint and paper. At first I painted on cheap paper that puckered at the first touch of a wet brush. Then I was taught the rudiments of wash painting, which needed slightly thicker paper to be wetted before you let loose swirls of paint on the surface. Some parental friends would go abroad regularly and occasionally I would receive a sketch-book made in phoren . The paper was clearly far superior, more precious to me than any gold and I would hoard the books, only taking them out on special occasions, filling a page at a time, sometimes with a gap of many months. Likewise, a pad of videshi water-colour paper was also a thing that incited greed and joy — the paint spread differently, giving you more control, and the dried colours glowed like no desi paper could match.

At some point I began to share my father’s passion for photography and this introduced me to yet another parallel paper universe. Colour photos in those days were restricted to slides but most photography was done in black and white, with the end goal being prints. We would take the photos, wind up the rolls and drop them off to the photo store. A few days later we would get contact sheets, the frames embedded on glossy paper. Pictures would be selected, crop marks would be made in red pencil and then we would get the final product, ‘quarter-size’ and ‘half-size’ prints on thick, matte paper. In my boarding school I gained access to the darkroom and there the paper became the centre of the magical alchemy redolent of the smells of the developer and fixer.

Etches and sketches

At the time I went to undergraduate college in America, my knowledge of the world and my skills — such as they were — all had as their platform some kind of paper: book, magazine, newspaper, art paper, photo paper. Though I went to college wanting to be a film-maker, most of the ancillary stuff I was aiming to produce also had to do with paper: notes, script, sketches, story-board, shot and sound logs. If I thought I knew my paper, a few weeks in America blew away any smugness.

In art class there were at least a dozen varieties of paper unknown to me, from the cheap newsprint on which you made your initial charcoal sketches to the super-expensive, thick, bliss-inducing Arches and BFK Rives etching sheets.

In photography class, again, the variety of paper was mind-boggling, starting from the cheap part plastic stuff on which you printed your work prints to the 100% rag, fully archival sheets of different grades. Basic stationary too, was addictive and I’ve still not lost my craving for ‘yellow legal’ pads on which I do most of my paper jotting.

Across the years, I learned more about the stuff and realised that actually some of the best paper has always come from India. For instance, speaking of high-end etching paper, the great Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, one of the best print-makers of the 20th century, suffered during World War II when his precious supply of paper from India was cut off.

Time always shifts the ground from under you, though, and the place paper has in my life today is very different from my college days. I still occasionally buy those little, expensive Moleskine type notebooks but I rarely fill them. Mostly they are kept as an alibi, as a proof to myself that I’m still capable of making like a writer, scribbling little notes in a Café de Cliche somewhere. My real notes are made on my phone and laptop. I still take photos but now I’ve stopped imagining that most of them will be printed on paper and some day hang on walls; if I’m lucky enough for people to be interested in my photos they will most likely see them on a computer screen in some digital context.

Prose on Kindle

I make my living as a writer and journalist so, yes, you may well be reading this on paper and not on the net, and hopefully my books will also continue to wind their way into pages printed on paper, but there’s every chance that an increasing number of readers will interrogate my prose on Kindle or some other digital gizmo.

However, the one thing that hasn’t changed much is the salivating agitation I feel upon entering a decent art store. There are the brushes and the paints, the charcoal varieties and the graphite sticks, the felt pens and the pen and ink nibs and holders.

And there, most exciting of all, are the stacks of paper pads, the lighter weight paper for rough sketching, the heavier ones for serious drawing, the heaviest ones, in three varieties, for proper water-colour work. I don’t always fall victim to my lust, I don’t always buy material, but every now and then I just walk into these stores and feel the paper, making sure my fingers are clean when I do. I don’t know how long paper will stay at the centre of human existence, but in the store I think back to all the different kinds of paper I’ve known and I feel happy. Surrounded by the stacks of pads and sheets, all blank, all waiting for the mark of the hand, I even manage to feel optimistic about life.

The columnist and filmmaker is author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh and Poriborton: An Election Diary . He edited Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories and was featured in Granta .

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