Previously:
Chapter 1: Two Lives
Chapter 2: The Spirit of Solitude
Chapter 3: Plausible Distraction
Chapter 4: Filed and Documented
Chapter 5: Black Coffee vs Black Sabbath
Chapter 6: Divine Puppet-Mastery
In all honesty, it was a little embarrassing to let her do it. One flight of stairs — just one flight — was all I really needed to climb up to grab the copy of Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Silence that had the paperplane.
“You were about to pass out half an hour ago,” she had argued.
“I need to do this,” I had argued back.
“No, you don’t. I will get the book for you.”
“No, you don’t understand. I need to do it. And you don’t have to.”
“That makes no sense. And stop with the chivalry and everything.”
“This is not chivalry. This is…”
“Personal?”
“Yeah”
“Tough luck. I can outrun you.”
“What?”
“If you plan to get up from that chair, I will run to the book first and pull it out.”
“What? What childishness is this?”
“It’s called blackmail. You see how that is funny? You were looking for Black Sabbath, but you found a Blackmail. Except I am female. Oh oh oh, you even used my computer to check your email.”
I had given up at this point. I had realised that I should have just handed over her laptop, thanked her for letting me read my mail and waited for her to leave. Why did I go ahead and tell her I needed to get my hands on this book?
She had not asked, though, why I needed the book. Or why I needed the one copy that was still possibly perched horizontally amongst Bertrand Russell’s best books. But she had wanted to hunt it down and bring it back for me. Was she possibly that bored in life? I knew I was and still I would not even have bothered with another person, even if I knew their name.
The question would eventually come. When she was back with the book, she would ask me for my name and what I did and things of that nature. She would inflict her own identity on me as well, possibly going as far as telling me things that are not very ladylike to admit. I am not entirely sure why I had that feeling about her, or why it bothered me in the least. I always thought of myself as a liberal in thoughts — a champion of the weird even — and yet there was a certain part of my self that was itching about the way she was. She was far too straightforward, far too imposing, far too…familiar.
I looked for Rationality in the few millimetres of water that were still there in the glass she had gotten me. Only the rippled likeness of a tired old man looked back, not very clearly. CC had been after me for a while to get a cataract operation done. I had told her I did not see the point. She had said that that was exactly the reason I should get it done. She is smart with words, my Choco-Chip. Some people pass on origami, some pass on their quick wit, both of which need a fair amount of self-indulgence to find their way into the double helix of genetic manuscripts.
It is almost poetic how the unit of inheritance is double helical — two strands intertwined and interconnected like the plot lines of two characters forming the basis of a story. Are stories not, similarly, the cultural units of inheritance? Richard Dawkins will agree and then say he thought of it first. I would not blame him. He is a genius of the written word, if not anything else, and a visionary in the field of popular science. Do visionaries suffer from cataract, though? Does it blur their composition of the possible futures? Does time also slow down for them and fill itself with thoughts that fly at the speed of light, too quick to capture what they really…
“Interesting letter this is. Sorry I read it.”
It was not something I had not expected. In fact, I had counted on her to read it through before even climbing down the stairs.
“Can I have it?”
“The book or the letter?”
“The letter, please.”
“So, you didn’t really need the book?”
“Not particularly.”
“But the pages between which this letter was stuck in seem important.”
“Wait, what?”
“Yeah. I mean, I am not sure or anything. I just read the letter and the pages and they seemed to go together.”
“Can I have it?”
“The letter or the book?”
“Bah. Just put down both of them on the table, okay?”
“God, you don’t have to snap at me. I am only helping.”
She set down the book and the unfolded paperplane on the table. Then she set herself down on one edge.
“You can use the chairs,” I suggested.
“I am fine here.”
“I am not. You are too close and too imposing. Please just sit down on the chair.”
“Is the grumpiness an age thing too, or were you born with it?”
“Born.”
“I guessed so too.”
“Will you now please let me read this?”
“There is no zoom on paper, by the way.”
“What?”
“There’s no zoom on paper. No three fifty percent.”
Of course she was right, and quite annoyingly so. I had forgotten my reading glasses at home in the rush to get here. Reading the email had been possible only because of the zoom. I was not sure then which infuriated me more: my own helplessness or her smug smile. Did she enjoy holding a senior citizen at gunpoint?
“The librarian will lend me her magnifying glass,” I fought back.
“Or I can read it for you,” she replied with the smile still on.
“Thank you for all your help. I will manage from here forth.”
“Or you could continue to use my help.”
“Alright, you want me to say it loud? You. Are. Annoying. Me.”
“And helping you too.”
“What part of it don’t you get? I don’t need your help. I don’t need you. Just go. Like you did.”
“Excuse me?”
“What? Now you’re offended? You asked for it yourself, lady.”
“You said I should go, like I did. What does that mean? I didn’t leave you and go, remember? I came back for you with the sandwich.”
“What are you talking about?”
“About what you said. I never went away. Why would you say that?”
This was getting out of hand. I knew why I had said what I had said, but admitting to it was out of question. I was addled, fazed, disoriented — I was projecting demons of the past on to inconveniences of the present. I needed to get a grip.
“I said that because…because…”
“Yeah?”
“Because I thought you wouldn’t come back. Right till the moment you did come back with the sandwich, I thought you had left me like everyone else keeps leaving me.”
“Everyone else, hunh? Baggage?”
That word again. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“Hmm…And now you’re regretting why I ever came back, aren’t you?”
Maybe it was timed too well, maybe her hand on my shoulder tore down my defences, maybe her laughter was irresistibly contagious — pick whatever rationalisation suits you to justify a laughter on a rather expected joke, but the fact remains that in that moment, when she asked that question and tapped my shoulder with her right hand, I laughed. Not the guffawing laughter that would draw the attention of people to me, not the sniggering one that she was doing either, but the simple silent laughter that escapes through the cracks of a smile. It was the kind of laughter you will probably have when you read a joke in the paper, or as is more prevalent today, on WhatsApp.
When we were done with our individual expressions of tickled humour, we looked at each other and in that moment, I made my decision.
“You win. Read it out to me.”
“That’s more like it.”
“Now, don’t get carried away. This is a one-time thing.”
“Is that another thing you tell your women?”
“Bah…focus.”
“Okay okay. But it was right there — like a low hanging fruit. And given the women you can get at this age, all fruits would be low hanging, right? Okay okay, only kidding. Only kidding.”
“The letter. Please.”
“Yeah. Here goes…”
I will be honest: I did not expect to find myself writing one of these again. It was only by accident, or as you used to put it, divine puppet-mastery that I found your message tucked inside Two Lives. It will be our book, I had said, all those years ago, when the copy in the library was still fresh and new. I did not know then what the book was about or why I had chosen it, except that it was about a couple’s lives, lives worthy of a book, and I wanted us to grow up to be similarly worthy too.
You might have guessed already that I no longer believe paperplanes are protected by love-magic or that they open only to the person who they are addressed to. This implies I am fully aware that leaving a message in a public space like this library will probably attract more eyes than we would be comfortable with. I was never very public with my words, and never did I write anything for anyone that was meant for an audience larger than that one person. In many ways, I remained so for so many more years. Even now, when as a part of my daily struggle to make a living, I must write reports upon reports, I am still not at ease about them being addressed to thousands of people. Only with much practice have I been able to overcome this inhibition.
Had I known, all those years ago, that the concept of love-magic my brother convinced me of was simply a fiction designed to amuse him, I would not have taught you this method of communication. But now I am glad that I did. And I hope you are well.
“Hmm…”
“And then there is this little paragraph from the book that caught my eye immediately. You want me to read it out too?”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
“This is a quote from Russell himself. This is what he had to say.”
So many things were forbidden to me that I acquired the habit of deceit, in which I persisted up to the age of twenty-one. It became second nature to me to think that whatever I was doing had better be kept to myself and I have never quite overcome the impulse to concealment which was thus generated. I still have an impulse to hide what I am reading when anybody comes into the room, and to hold my tongue generally as to where I have been, and what I have done. It is only by a certain effort of will that I can overcome this impulse, which was generated by the years during which I had to find my way among a set of foolish prohibitions.
“Do you see the similarities?” she asked excited.
“A bit, but not much. I still think it is just coincidence.”
“Or divine puppet-mastery.”
“You may say so. But given what she had written…”
“Wait, now. Who is she? The other person?”
“Yeah…”
“Seeing that divine puppet-mastery has brought you and me together, you might as well tell me the whole story now, don’t you think?”
“Seeing that I don’t have my glasses, I am forced to agree.”
“I will take that.”
Treasure Aisle is a new original fiction series. In this story spanning two literary decades, the books in a public library will guide a retired one-hit-wonder-writer on an impulsive quest for finding a reason to love again.
The next chapter is out already. You can read it here:
