One Thing I Will Not Return If I Find It Randomly Somewhere, and I Hope Not to Feel Bad About It

A confession.

I am, by most reasonable measures, an honest person. I return wallets. I hand in phones. I once chased a woman for two blocks in Connaught Place because she dropped a ₹500 note, and when I caught up to her, breathless and sweating, she looked at me like I was either a saint or a lunatic, which are, in central Delhi, often the same thing.

I have an ekTAG on my keychain, my dashboard, and my laptop bag. I believe in the system. I believe in the small, anonymous contract between strangers that says: your things are your things, and I will help them find their way home.

But I need to confess something.

There is one thing I will not return. One category of found object that I will pick up, examine, and quietly, shamelessly, without a flicker of guilt, keep. And I need to get this off my chest because it has been bothering me for years, the way a small, unconfessed sin bothers a person who otherwise considers themselves decent.

I will not return a good book.

The Crime

I don't mean a Kindle. A Kindle is an electronic device. It has an owner, a purchase history, a library of highlights and annotations that are intimate in a way their owner probably hasn't considered. Keeping a found Kindle would be theft. I would return a Kindle.

I mean a paperback. A physical, dog-eared, spine-cracked, coffee-stained paperback left on a park bench or a train seat or a café table, with no name inside the front cover and no identifying marks beyond the ghost of someone's reading life pressed into its pages.

That book, if it finds me, is staying with me. And I am not sorry.

I should be sorry. I know the arguments. The book belongs to someone. That someone might be looking for it. They might have been halfway through it. They might have left it by accident, not by design. They might, at this very moment, be retracing their steps through the park, checking between the bench slats, asking the chai vendor if anyone turned in a copy of The God of Small Things with a torn cover and a bus ticket used as a bookmark on page 174.

I know all of this. And I am still keeping the book.

The Defence

Your Honour, I'd like to present the case for the defence.

A book is not a wallet. A wallet is a container of identity, money, credit cards, ID, the small bureaucratic infrastructure of a life. Losing a wallet is a crisis. Losing a book is, at worst, an inconvenience. The book is still in print. It costs ₹299 on Amazon. The reader can replace it in forty-eight hours and resume on page 174 with a fresh copy and a proper bookmark.

A book is not a phone. A phone contains your photographs, your messages, your entire digital existence. It is, as Russell Belk would say, an extension of the self. A book is an extension of the author's self, not the reader's. The reader is a visitor. The author is the owner. And the author, being published, has already given the book away, thousands of times over, to anyone willing to pay the cover price.

A book is not a pair of sunglasses or a set of keys or a child's water bottle with a crooked T-Rex sticker. Those objects are personal, irreplaceable in their specificity, tied to a single owner by use and memory. A book is, by its nature, communal. It was written to be passed from hand to hand. Its entire purpose is transmission.

And here is my strongest argument: the book was left on a bench. Not dropped. Not forgotten. Left. There is a difference. A dropped book falls from a bag, tumbles from a lap, escapes without the owner's consent. A left book is placed, gently, on a surface, in a public space, by someone who has finished it or abandoned it or, most likely, set it free. The book on the bench is Schrödinger's property: simultaneously owned and unowned, claimed and abandoned, waiting to be observed into one state or the other.

I choose to observe it into the "free to a good home" state. I am aware this is self-serving. I am also aware that I don't care.

The Moral Philosophy

Maimonides, the twelfth-century philosopher I quoted in a previous essay about returning lost items, would not approve. His framework requires the finder to make every reasonable effort to locate the owner. Posters, announcements, public declarations. For a wallet, this makes sense. For a well-thumbed copy of A Suitable Boy left on a Metro seat, it feels like overkill.

Aristotle might be more lenient. His concept of eudaimonia, human flourishing, suggests that virtue lies in the mean between extremes. The extreme of hoarding is greed. The extreme of returning everything, including objects that were arguably gifted to the universe, is pedantry. The virtuous mean, surely, is reading the book and then leaving it on a different bench for the next person.

The Buddhist tradition of non-attachment would ask: does the book spark suffering? If the original owner is suffering because of its absence, then yes, I should return it. But if they left it on a bench and walked away without a backward glance, their attachment has already dissolved. The book is, in Buddhist terms, free.

The Bhagavad Gita, which I have not read in its entirety but which I invoke with the confidence of someone who has read enough of it to be dangerous, speaks of performing one's duty without attachment to the result. My duty, as a reader who has found a book, is to read it. The result, whether the original owner ever knows, is not my concern.

I am building a philosophical fortress to justify keeping a ₹299 paperback, and I am aware of how absurd that is. But the fact that I need the fortress tells you something interesting about the moral weight of found objects, even trivial ones.

The Real Reason

The philosophical arguments are decoration. The real reason I keep found books is simpler, and less defensible, and more human.

A found book feels like fate.

There is a tradition, informal and lovely, called BookCrossing. Founded in 2001, it encourages people to "release" books into the wild, leaving them in public places with a note inviting the finder to read and re-release. Over 13 million books have been registered on the BookCrossing website. The movement is built on a single, romantic premise: a book should travel, and the right book will find the right reader at the right time.

I don't believe in fate. I believe in probability, cognitive bias, and the human tendency to assign meaning to coincidence. But I also believe that finding a copy of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance on a bench in Lodhi Garden on a Tuesday afternoon when you've just had a terrible day and you need, more than anything, to be reminded that suffering can coexist with beauty, is the kind of coincidence that earns the right to be called something more.

The book finds you. Not the other way around.

And when it finds you, the correct response is not to hand it to the nearest security guard and file a report. The correct response is to sit down, open to page one, and begin.

The Guilt

There is, I concede, a small residual guilt. It sits in the back of my mind like an unread notification, faint but persistent. What if the owner is looking for it? What if it was a gift from someone they loved? What if there was an inscription on the title page that I didn't notice, a faded "Happy Birthday, Meera, love always" in blue ink?

This is where my honesty breaks down. Where the ekTAG philosophy, the beautiful, frictionless infrastructure of return, bumps up against the one object I've exempted from the system. I would tag my keys, my car, my wallet, my bag, my children's water bottles. I would not tag my paperback. Because a tagged book is a book that is owned, and an owned book, left on a bench, is an obligation.

An untagged book on a bench is a gift.

And I am accepting it. Every single time.

I hope not to feel bad about it. I mostly succeed.

ekTAG, for everything you want returned. Except, perhaps, a good book. ektag.app