Hamid squinted. “Viruses? Like a sickness?”

And the tablet? It sat on the side table, screen dark, power cord coiled like a sleeping snake. But Hamid didn’t mind. He had what he wanted—not just a file, but a friend.

Hamid recoiled. “That small thing? It holds thousands of pages?”

“A cloud?” Hamid looked out the window at the star-dusted sky. “Then it is not mine. It is borrowed from the air.”

Aydin clicked. A progress bar filled like a slow tide: Downloading... Then, a soft ding . “It’s yours.”

“Not for you, Atuk. For the machine.”

That evening, Hamid sat in his favorite chair, the physical book cradled in his lap. He turned to the chapter on kindness. He smelled the fresh ink. He traced the Arabic diacritics with a fingertip.

His grandson, Aydin, bounded into the room. “Atuk, what are you doing?”

That night, Aydin showed him how to enlarge the text, how to bookmark the chapter on patience. But Hamid remained troubled. “When I turn a paper page,” he said, “I remember where the wisdom lives. Left side, near the spine. But this… where does the knowledge go?”

Hamid stared at the screen. There it was—the crisp title page, the familiar chapters on purification, prayer, and character. He reached out and touched the glass. “It has no weight,” he whispered.