Anusha climbed the stone stairs to get to the assembly hall. Pacing diagonally through the great hall, she found a place by the corner beside the other women. She was suffering from a severe headache all night long; in the magical moments of the crack of dawn, she managed to get some sleep and was presently late to the daily summoning. The mustached officer in khaki trousers swiped his finger in air; Anusha rose up cursing and coughing. She reached his desk and folded her arms before her. The officer crossed his legs, unfolded a paper from his shirt pocket, ran his finger over it, and rolling his eyes to meet her, showed her the adjoining room.
In the room, a lady in pin striped trousers was looking through the window that overlooked the railway track. Now a train scurried about from east to west. Stepping into the lady’s elongated shadow, Anusha waited. The lady had dyed her hair brown and wore a nice pony that rested on her nape ever so beautifully. She turned around to face Anusha. With a polite nod of her chin, she invited Anusha to take a seat near the window alongside the flower vase with fresh roses. The lady had tucked her shirt in. The belt around her waist for golden in colour, her finger nails and the crowning plastic mound on the sandals wore gold paint, and she presently scratched the under-hang of her left ear that was embellished with a gold painted pendant.
Today, she was going to read out a story to Anusha; a short story. Memory cropping in the prison camps had become quite inexplicable recently. It was a story written by a hyderabadi writer; he wanted to find out how his story felt when a reader did read it. Memory trading made it possible for writers to stop second guessing and buy the first hand memory experience from the readers. Writers considered the feedback obtained from such readings and revised their novels, rewrote and made amends. The practice was soon gaining popularity among the literary guild. Outside, in the hall, the other women were made to watch a movie that was only partially finished.
The story was about a book that wept. It was a first person narrative “who would have thought that a book would weep. But I did. When I am removed from my library, away from my pals and adversaries, I feel alone and lonely. I weep and weep until I am replaced in the library. An ascetic and disciplined individual would replace me in the same shelf, my original shelf. And I comely rested between my two pals on either side, leaning heavily on one side. Leaning lugubriously, there we stayed until another reader dragged us out of our slumber. But more often than not, someone would find my contents unappetizing and shove me away someplace else and I found it increasingly discomfiting to lean on strangers. Imagine having to spend time wedged between two strangers one who you leaned on, and another who leaned on you in turn. There are times when someone would lock us away in a college bag or a luggage bag and it would be days before we were even opened. All the while I was spread-eagled on hairy thighs in the bathrooms far away from my home library; I wondered what my pals were doing. It became apparent that I was the most borrowed one. It worked like this; any new reader sifted through the books and gauged the popularity of books on how often they were borrowed. And so it was that I was borrowed over and over again while my pals slanted in the shelves until their pages grew dark and they wore their hard cover-ends frayed and rolled. And then, after a decade of borrowing, a Sunday morning came when it was decided that I was put away for good. I was discarded. I had serviced so many readers that I barely stood erect in the shelf these days. My pals were of course as stiff as timber. And I was put away in the room where they sold us away to the members of the library at a discounted price. With a good ten of my front pages lost, a ten in the middle torn and a ten in the end coffee stained beyond repair, I was sold for a little over fifty rupees. For the price of a cigarette pack; that was what I was reduced to. A literary masterpiece and now someone bought me. The new house was like an old age home for me. Here, I was tucked away in the corner alongside English translations of Anton Chekov and a great many other books that I had no acquaintance with. My days in the glass faced shelf weren’t as enjoyable as when I was in the library. But what can one do but lament. So, I slanted against the shelf wall and supported Chekov for the rest of the time. Days turned into weeks, and weeks into months. Nothing dramatic seemed to happen in here. I felt rather lonely; once in a while the shelf saw additions. A new book in the shelf always stirred multifarious emotions amongst the other books. Slightly older ones like us wanted to know if we were acquainted with the newcomer; the younger lot was skeptical and leaned so heavily on the new comer that it buckled and wore an indentation or a dent in a little over a week’s time. Then the owner would find out one evening when he was sifting through the collection, dusted the old ones, and replaced the new one somewhere in the middle where it was less likely to get buckled. And now it was between us old timers. So it was that two very old pals such as me and Chekov were separated on account of the newcomer. He was now wedged tightly between us.”
“You see, we all liked to lean on one another. That is what old timers did. Nothing wrong in it; a verisimilitude perhaps! Yes, that was it. But the new additions made it stiffer and tighter with little breathing space. Now our pages were crushed tight and our paper backs stuck to hard backs beside us. So the owner would tussle with our paper backs to undo the damage. But soon, it transpired that I was tucked in here for good. You see, the glass faced shelves only saw additions, rearranging, dusting, and mending. But in a very long time, I have not had a borrower. Yes, in my library, in those soggy old days, I lamented that I was the borrowed over and over again. But the tedium of getting caught in the glass shelf here with no hands to exchange me, with no librarian to press a date stamp on me, and with no teenage besotted girl to scribble a love poem in the curl of my middle paper, I felt utterly lonely. In fact, my pages wore scribbles of many a passionate love quotes. It all began with a high school girl who found me enjoyable and wrote (mind you, it was against the library rules to do that) a nice little poem of love. Another borrower in the summer of the same year, took a liking to the poem and appended two more lines to it, and signed at the end. So it was that any reader who got till that page invariably added a line or two and signed, for I was loyal and carried such scribbles to the end of my life. I wore it on my death bed; the epitaph on my grave stone read those scribbles. Yes I was loyal; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And then of course there were the silly cows that tore a page or two. And I bled profusely; any reader who got till the tearing always saw through my suffering. The readers shared my suffering and in a plateau of suffering, there was nothing worse than a fragmented reading. The flow ceased; the ebb and tide of reading paused. It was only a page, why bother? I wish I could tell my readers that. But you know just as well as I do, it was not that simple. Many readers were aggravated and disconcerted. And to think that my bleeding and suffering necessarily stalled further ruptures? To think that there was morality beyond my tales, to think that my readers were compassionate? Oh what an old fool I was, what a dusty little bent-kneed, crumple faced, burnt brown coloured book I was. Nothing can be far from truth. The truth was that many readers found the torn pages between 81 and 84 almost titillating. Their hands scurried about the floor of my binding to trace more ruptures if any. Yes, there were others. When the librarian found me in the shelf leaking the page 69 with a blank back, he pulled me out to examine further. What followed was an understanding shrug; a grin, a sheepish scuffle, and a lament from the librarian. There I was like a wounded soldier trying to figure out if I will be pardoned for my seductive mood swings. No, it was not to be. I was taken to the head librarian’s desk for a last word. And two days later, he declared me dead and un-repairable. So I was abandoned; I had little time to alert my pals of my fate. What would they think when they notice an air gap in the leaning ladder of books. Yes, they would think that I got all high and might what with all the borrowing. I was the only borrow-worthy book in the shelf. Yes my adversaries or competitors from other shelves gave me a hard time. More borrowing meant more borrowing; less borrowing meant there was little chance that anyone would ever borrow at all. Occasionally, a literature student hurriedly went past our shelf in search of George Eliot or Virginia Woolf. Then the student would pause at our shelf and finger tug and palm pull one of the books that had not been opened since the dawn of the library, the big bang of library. And everyone would hold back a smile, an inexpressible heave surged and swathed us for a while. The day was usually spent in merry for one of us finally got to see the front. We, the soldiers of the war were written, printed, cover-designed, bound, and shelved so we could be used when the time came. Most of us languished in the shelves biding our time that never came at all. Most us died without even smelling the intent gaze of a reader. Some, such as I was, possessed an ineffable charm - one that pleasured the reader. It only naturally followed that I was borrowed.”
“Now, the wasps fidget around us with their wings. Now the moths beat the glass face with their wings. A lizard slipped through the narrow opening of the glass face and neared me with a purpose on its mind. A moth was stuck in the paperback curl of my toes; now it came and extended its pink tongue to lap and slurp. And it was over. Why, I wondered, why such a borrow-worthy life of mine had to be tucked away in the glass face shelves of a Martian land. And then the unthinkable happened. The owner of the Martian land had a visitor, a girl. A very pretty girl, who rose up from her seat while the owner went into the kitchen to make coffee; now with her manicured fingers, she tucked her hair away around the right ear and neared the shelf. Now her eyes rolled all over the place with no particular interest in any of us. The newcomer seemed to interest her; she ran her longish finger over our spine from the far end towards my end. Now she tilted her head to read out our names one by one; I must admit it’s a bit of a drag to read out form our spines. I admit that; nothing more. Now her gaze was so close that I felt the familiar feeling, a whiff of cold stare, an examining stare as if to sneer and jeer. A stare that meant to ask me if I was worthy at all, what were my credentials; have others read me; how many have read me? Was I likeable, was I pretentious, and was I just another load off the shelf? Why was my font so short, why were my pages so aged and smelly (that actually was an advantage; I managed to intoxicate some of my readers with smelly papers)? And why was I so fat and ugly?”
“She flipped me over and read out the teasing credits on my back. Now yes, this was it. I was going to be read after all. No one who got this far has ever tucked me away into the shelf. Well, of course there was that one occasion when a douchebag mindlessly replaced me in the shelf after he read that teasing part on my back. But we can forget about that. Presently, the smooth touch of her naked palms aroused my attention; it was as though a flush of pink rouged her cheeks as she read the teaser on my back. Now, here it comes. Yes, I passed the test, for now her eyes were wide open and she turned me around. When that happened, I was more than certain that I was going to be read. Now she ran her eyes rather hurriedly through the introduction. My spine was rested on her left palm while her right hand flipped through my pages. And uh! I leaked pages. My binding was not as strong anymore. I was old and just as the jawline of some of my readers grew limp and bled red; I leaked pages off my bottom. 7, 89, 45, 32, and 76… One by one, they would have reached the floor in buoyant flights, but the girl was sharp. She brought her hands close to her bosom and now my leaked pages were held between my grumpy old face and her lovely palpitating bosom. Her mascara painted eyelashes now stood stiff beneath her worm-like eyebrows and she lowered herself into the sofa. Here, she slackened her grip and my pages left the pillowed folds of her bosom and landed into the flattened and straightened scarf on her lap. The scarf was worn on one side with a brooch holding it on the left shoulder and the right end formed a pool to collect my leaked and aged papers.”
“And now the owner returned. What was my fate? Suffice to say that I was half expecting this already. She asked him if I was a discarded book from the library. Yes, the reply was prompt. Now with my spine rested on the sofa, she went about rearranging my paper flesh in order. 7, 89, and 45… Here she paused. She read the poem that was appended to over and over again. He saw a chance, a magical opportunity. With a neutral tone, he clarified that he was the third reader to append lines to the poem on the 46th page. Now he was leaning beside her; pointing with his index finger to the lines, he now dragged himself closer to her. Now vertiginous with the closeness, he slid his hand along the lines he wrote. Now she batted her eyelids. From his vantage point, he could see the strict bridge of her nose and the mesmerizing sweat bead on her lipsticked upper lip. She puckered her lips as she read out the lines. Now she parted her lips and rolled her tongue lengthwise over the lower lip, bit the upper lip, averted her gaze and said ‘I started this.’ of course, she was the one to start it all. She had written those first few lines of a poem that acquired a life of itself and existed in the book like an island in the sea. It attracted all the readers towards it, and bared its lines so the inebriated reader found in its lines, a safe-house to explore his feelings and make vent to them.
Silken swirl of the scarf frill on her naked shoulder, lolling swish of the crocodile-pin hem of her pony, and on and on, it went on, like a train’s beam to price out objects from the dark. Now a lamp pole and now an overhanging tree, now a bridge and now a lone vagabond. So it was that the owner and the girl found in me, a bewitching tale that drew their penned fingers to rest on my number 46. And yes, they almost immediately fell in love. But what did I care? What was to happen with me? I was under the impression that I was going to be read after a long time. Well, two months later, all hope was lost. My number 46 was neatly photo-framed alongside the honeymooning couple. And the rest of me was tucked away in a trunk case full of maternal objects in an attic.”
In the room, a lady in pin striped trousers was looking through the window that overlooked the railway track. Now a train scurried about from east to west. Stepping into the lady’s elongated shadow, Anusha waited. The lady had dyed her hair brown and wore a nice pony that rested on her nape ever so beautifully. She turned around to face Anusha. With a polite nod of her chin, she invited Anusha to take a seat near the window alongside the flower vase with fresh roses. The lady had tucked her shirt in. The belt around her waist for golden in colour, her finger nails and the crowning plastic mound on the sandals wore gold paint, and she presently scratched the under-hang of her left ear that was embellished with a gold painted pendant.
Today, she was going to read out a story to Anusha; a short story. Memory cropping in the prison camps had become quite inexplicable recently. It was a story written by a hyderabadi writer; he wanted to find out how his story felt when a reader did read it. Memory trading made it possible for writers to stop second guessing and buy the first hand memory experience from the readers. Writers considered the feedback obtained from such readings and revised their novels, rewrote and made amends. The practice was soon gaining popularity among the literary guild. Outside, in the hall, the other women were made to watch a movie that was only partially finished.
The story was about a book that wept. It was a first person narrative “who would have thought that a book would weep. But I did. When I am removed from my library, away from my pals and adversaries, I feel alone and lonely. I weep and weep until I am replaced in the library. An ascetic and disciplined individual would replace me in the same shelf, my original shelf. And I comely rested between my two pals on either side, leaning heavily on one side. Leaning lugubriously, there we stayed until another reader dragged us out of our slumber. But more often than not, someone would find my contents unappetizing and shove me away someplace else and I found it increasingly discomfiting to lean on strangers. Imagine having to spend time wedged between two strangers one who you leaned on, and another who leaned on you in turn. There are times when someone would lock us away in a college bag or a luggage bag and it would be days before we were even opened. All the while I was spread-eagled on hairy thighs in the bathrooms far away from my home library; I wondered what my pals were doing. It became apparent that I was the most borrowed one. It worked like this; any new reader sifted through the books and gauged the popularity of books on how often they were borrowed. And so it was that I was borrowed over and over again while my pals slanted in the shelves until their pages grew dark and they wore their hard cover-ends frayed and rolled. And then, after a decade of borrowing, a Sunday morning came when it was decided that I was put away for good. I was discarded. I had serviced so many readers that I barely stood erect in the shelf these days. My pals were of course as stiff as timber. And I was put away in the room where they sold us away to the members of the library at a discounted price. With a good ten of my front pages lost, a ten in the middle torn and a ten in the end coffee stained beyond repair, I was sold for a little over fifty rupees. For the price of a cigarette pack; that was what I was reduced to. A literary masterpiece and now someone bought me. The new house was like an old age home for me. Here, I was tucked away in the corner alongside English translations of Anton Chekov and a great many other books that I had no acquaintance with. My days in the glass faced shelf weren’t as enjoyable as when I was in the library. But what can one do but lament. So, I slanted against the shelf wall and supported Chekov for the rest of the time. Days turned into weeks, and weeks into months. Nothing dramatic seemed to happen in here. I felt rather lonely; once in a while the shelf saw additions. A new book in the shelf always stirred multifarious emotions amongst the other books. Slightly older ones like us wanted to know if we were acquainted with the newcomer; the younger lot was skeptical and leaned so heavily on the new comer that it buckled and wore an indentation or a dent in a little over a week’s time. Then the owner would find out one evening when he was sifting through the collection, dusted the old ones, and replaced the new one somewhere in the middle where it was less likely to get buckled. And now it was between us old timers. So it was that two very old pals such as me and Chekov were separated on account of the newcomer. He was now wedged tightly between us.”
“You see, we all liked to lean on one another. That is what old timers did. Nothing wrong in it; a verisimilitude perhaps! Yes, that was it. But the new additions made it stiffer and tighter with little breathing space. Now our pages were crushed tight and our paper backs stuck to hard backs beside us. So the owner would tussle with our paper backs to undo the damage. But soon, it transpired that I was tucked in here for good. You see, the glass faced shelves only saw additions, rearranging, dusting, and mending. But in a very long time, I have not had a borrower. Yes, in my library, in those soggy old days, I lamented that I was the borrowed over and over again. But the tedium of getting caught in the glass shelf here with no hands to exchange me, with no librarian to press a date stamp on me, and with no teenage besotted girl to scribble a love poem in the curl of my middle paper, I felt utterly lonely. In fact, my pages wore scribbles of many a passionate love quotes. It all began with a high school girl who found me enjoyable and wrote (mind you, it was against the library rules to do that) a nice little poem of love. Another borrower in the summer of the same year, took a liking to the poem and appended two more lines to it, and signed at the end. So it was that any reader who got till that page invariably added a line or two and signed, for I was loyal and carried such scribbles to the end of my life. I wore it on my death bed; the epitaph on my grave stone read those scribbles. Yes I was loyal; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And then of course there were the silly cows that tore a page or two. And I bled profusely; any reader who got till the tearing always saw through my suffering. The readers shared my suffering and in a plateau of suffering, there was nothing worse than a fragmented reading. The flow ceased; the ebb and tide of reading paused. It was only a page, why bother? I wish I could tell my readers that. But you know just as well as I do, it was not that simple. Many readers were aggravated and disconcerted. And to think that my bleeding and suffering necessarily stalled further ruptures? To think that there was morality beyond my tales, to think that my readers were compassionate? Oh what an old fool I was, what a dusty little bent-kneed, crumple faced, burnt brown coloured book I was. Nothing can be far from truth. The truth was that many readers found the torn pages between 81 and 84 almost titillating. Their hands scurried about the floor of my binding to trace more ruptures if any. Yes, there were others. When the librarian found me in the shelf leaking the page 69 with a blank back, he pulled me out to examine further. What followed was an understanding shrug; a grin, a sheepish scuffle, and a lament from the librarian. There I was like a wounded soldier trying to figure out if I will be pardoned for my seductive mood swings. No, it was not to be. I was taken to the head librarian’s desk for a last word. And two days later, he declared me dead and un-repairable. So I was abandoned; I had little time to alert my pals of my fate. What would they think when they notice an air gap in the leaning ladder of books. Yes, they would think that I got all high and might what with all the borrowing. I was the only borrow-worthy book in the shelf. Yes my adversaries or competitors from other shelves gave me a hard time. More borrowing meant more borrowing; less borrowing meant there was little chance that anyone would ever borrow at all. Occasionally, a literature student hurriedly went past our shelf in search of George Eliot or Virginia Woolf. Then the student would pause at our shelf and finger tug and palm pull one of the books that had not been opened since the dawn of the library, the big bang of library. And everyone would hold back a smile, an inexpressible heave surged and swathed us for a while. The day was usually spent in merry for one of us finally got to see the front. We, the soldiers of the war were written, printed, cover-designed, bound, and shelved so we could be used when the time came. Most of us languished in the shelves biding our time that never came at all. Most us died without even smelling the intent gaze of a reader. Some, such as I was, possessed an ineffable charm - one that pleasured the reader. It only naturally followed that I was borrowed.”
“Now, the wasps fidget around us with their wings. Now the moths beat the glass face with their wings. A lizard slipped through the narrow opening of the glass face and neared me with a purpose on its mind. A moth was stuck in the paperback curl of my toes; now it came and extended its pink tongue to lap and slurp. And it was over. Why, I wondered, why such a borrow-worthy life of mine had to be tucked away in the glass face shelves of a Martian land. And then the unthinkable happened. The owner of the Martian land had a visitor, a girl. A very pretty girl, who rose up from her seat while the owner went into the kitchen to make coffee; now with her manicured fingers, she tucked her hair away around the right ear and neared the shelf. Now her eyes rolled all over the place with no particular interest in any of us. The newcomer seemed to interest her; she ran her longish finger over our spine from the far end towards my end. Now she tilted her head to read out our names one by one; I must admit it’s a bit of a drag to read out form our spines. I admit that; nothing more. Now her gaze was so close that I felt the familiar feeling, a whiff of cold stare, an examining stare as if to sneer and jeer. A stare that meant to ask me if I was worthy at all, what were my credentials; have others read me; how many have read me? Was I likeable, was I pretentious, and was I just another load off the shelf? Why was my font so short, why were my pages so aged and smelly (that actually was an advantage; I managed to intoxicate some of my readers with smelly papers)? And why was I so fat and ugly?”
“She flipped me over and read out the teasing credits on my back. Now yes, this was it. I was going to be read after all. No one who got this far has ever tucked me away into the shelf. Well, of course there was that one occasion when a douchebag mindlessly replaced me in the shelf after he read that teasing part on my back. But we can forget about that. Presently, the smooth touch of her naked palms aroused my attention; it was as though a flush of pink rouged her cheeks as she read the teaser on my back. Now, here it comes. Yes, I passed the test, for now her eyes were wide open and she turned me around. When that happened, I was more than certain that I was going to be read. Now she ran her eyes rather hurriedly through the introduction. My spine was rested on her left palm while her right hand flipped through my pages. And uh! I leaked pages. My binding was not as strong anymore. I was old and just as the jawline of some of my readers grew limp and bled red; I leaked pages off my bottom. 7, 89, 45, 32, and 76… One by one, they would have reached the floor in buoyant flights, but the girl was sharp. She brought her hands close to her bosom and now my leaked pages were held between my grumpy old face and her lovely palpitating bosom. Her mascara painted eyelashes now stood stiff beneath her worm-like eyebrows and she lowered herself into the sofa. Here, she slackened her grip and my pages left the pillowed folds of her bosom and landed into the flattened and straightened scarf on her lap. The scarf was worn on one side with a brooch holding it on the left shoulder and the right end formed a pool to collect my leaked and aged papers.”
“And now the owner returned. What was my fate? Suffice to say that I was half expecting this already. She asked him if I was a discarded book from the library. Yes, the reply was prompt. Now with my spine rested on the sofa, she went about rearranging my paper flesh in order. 7, 89, and 45… Here she paused. She read the poem that was appended to over and over again. He saw a chance, a magical opportunity. With a neutral tone, he clarified that he was the third reader to append lines to the poem on the 46th page. Now he was leaning beside her; pointing with his index finger to the lines, he now dragged himself closer to her. Now vertiginous with the closeness, he slid his hand along the lines he wrote. Now she batted her eyelids. From his vantage point, he could see the strict bridge of her nose and the mesmerizing sweat bead on her lipsticked upper lip. She puckered her lips as she read out the lines. Now she parted her lips and rolled her tongue lengthwise over the lower lip, bit the upper lip, averted her gaze and said ‘I started this.’ of course, she was the one to start it all. She had written those first few lines of a poem that acquired a life of itself and existed in the book like an island in the sea. It attracted all the readers towards it, and bared its lines so the inebriated reader found in its lines, a safe-house to explore his feelings and make vent to them.
Silken swirl of the scarf frill on her naked shoulder, lolling swish of the crocodile-pin hem of her pony, and on and on, it went on, like a train’s beam to price out objects from the dark. Now a lamp pole and now an overhanging tree, now a bridge and now a lone vagabond. So it was that the owner and the girl found in me, a bewitching tale that drew their penned fingers to rest on my number 46. And yes, they almost immediately fell in love. But what did I care? What was to happen with me? I was under the impression that I was going to be read after a long time. Well, two months later, all hope was lost. My number 46 was neatly photo-framed alongside the honeymooning couple. And the rest of me was tucked away in a trunk case full of maternal objects in an attic.”
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