Chap II : Books & Silence

A library, an old man and some former thoughts..and madness ( of course) . What else do you need?

Who would have believed where I am sitting right now? It’s a library which half exists in a world, which is non-existent at least to me. It’s long shelves look at me with a scorn and a lack of recognition, which is vaguely familiar. There are long hanging fans too which are suspended from ceilings with gray and black soot foamed in their arms. They don’t rotate, not right now. There is laughter and a voice, which is drooling away from the corridors. There are a couple of folks who share this library space with me. One of them is an old man whose life could be possibly as different from me as it possibly could. I cannot avoid his narrowing glance towards my new coat through his spectacles. Nor the thousands of invisible arrows hurled in my direction to which I don’t have a bow. I didn’t come to the library thinking that I might have to fight. In fact it was preposterous, a stopgap stop waiting between stations before changing the train. So here I sit with an air of unpleasantness or rather a sense of uncomfortable seeps through me like the waves of a waning ocean on the shores of Istanbul, where presently the morning is about to start. The girl whose eyes are like lonely islands and whose smile is like the morning ferry on a deserted island is now standing at her doorstep, waiting one last second before she plans to go somewhere. Her hair is open; she has forgot to tie it in a hurry. Her dress casual, white folded full-sleeved shirt and blue jeans with a shade of gray at its base because of dust and possible over use.

I meanwhile gaze outside, through the humongous library door outside into the social psychology corridor. All I can see are mad men and women sitting in wooden benches waiting their turns to get the call from professors who are cheaper than psychiatrists, who don’t prescribe medicines but prescribe well being and investigative, contemplative cure at the cost of a mobile number, a cup of tea which gets cold before you can finish it and a bus which brings you to this place called Madness café. Oh, I had almost forgot that old man. He let me know of his omnipresence with the clearing of his nose that reminded me of farts from the times of Alexander, loud and frankly unnerving. His nervous folding and unfolding of his hands tells me that he has an old woman back in his home. It is a bus ride plus a thousand steps away, from here. He has a dog whose eyes look blind because they are cloudy. We can never know for sure whether it’s blind, though. We can judge by placing a bone of meat devoid of fragrance, cut in the market by merchants, who stay close to the sea and see ships coming to the port, bringing unknown faces and known commodities to town. The old man talks about the heat present in Indian winters and the reasons he carries his stole with him tonight. Because he had suffered. But haven’t we all? His however, is endless, written all over his lined face and are like exclamation marks all over his old, smelly body.

I instead of focusing on this man start thinking about the journey that brings me to this wooden table. The same wooden table where innocents had sat before. Innocents and the innocuous who used to friends, with whom I managed to connect in a superficially real away in a time, when I had best friends who detested the fact that I chose a girlfriend at the very first, few months of my ever unanticipated college life. The crows cry all day long as the day comes towards an end. There are some people who like to arrange and rearrange. There are some who sing with loud microphones and with a tune that is as religious as Quran in a wooden cover and painted red borders. I wonder how it all started. Was it the desert heat? Was it the meaningless life? Was it the lizards all over the desert sand that instigated? Was it the faceless women who were beautiful but were unborn because birth is a process not initiated in wombs but in men’s head? In libraries such as this one or the one where the highway ends into the small road glittered with shops, which stay closed on Thursday and Sunday, because they would rather live a life than sell, Déjà vu happens. It is a feeling that reminisces us of an event that has never really happened before but seems oddly familiar. It is like a memory from a past life or the bubbling of a memory into the head of a man who has short-term memory loss.

The old man has come back and he seems to be the man who cannot keep anything else but this library. His recurrences is making me afraid of sins I did not commit. The man I killed because he was innocent. The girl I ditched because she didn’t cheat on me. The prize I won because I did not contribute anything in that research. He is keeping a count of books, a job he doesn’t get tired even if he does the exact, same thing everyday. Just like every morning, he sits in the toilet with his morning newspaper and his bowels fail to clear out. Just as his wife, calls his name whenever he is inside the toilet, saying that the morning tea mixed with ginger is ready and she will cover it with a metal lid possibly made up of aluminum. Just as he calls an unknown number every day at 5.00 pm for the last thirteen years even if he has a grandson who was seen fooling around with two young lasses none of whom he (his grandson) will end up marrying. After all, he is a librarian. You cannot just discount him. There are other things I notice about this man whom we see everyday but never recognize. His slippers, his bag and his stick all resembling him as many ways as Julia Roberts resembles that girl whom I dated last Friday night and forgot to take the number before I left early morning.

As I would plan to pack my stuffs and head for some more of the real world, the debate where it’s colder, inside the library or in the corridor just outside it, would remain a question whose answer I may not know at least not in this lifetime. Just as I would never see that very pretty face whom I saw in a bus for whole seventeen seconds, while I was waiting for someone in the pavement and thought of what would happen if she was destined for me. How the children I could have with her or the kisses she would give me by the riverside on a winter evening like this would never really happen. It’s something that made me so sad that I shrink to the depths of my melancholy without poetry, old grandfather watches and hair aromas of all beautiful women of this whole wide world.

Author's Note

"Seek the madness in libraries,
For the madness lies in books
The dust may be a few years old
But the old man's tale is true"
- NP

Reviews

[Ice QueenJen]

A great tale about being in a library.

[kylie]

You nailed it. I love this. I have nothing more to say(: fantastic job.

[roarke]

I REALLY wish I could write like this. Fantastic stuff.

[Coyote Poetry]

The library is a open field of so many people with purposes of research and desire to accomplish something. Few of us are there to be entertain and watch the flow of people. Your story was very entertaining. I like the description of the patrons and their stories. A excellent chapter. Thank you.
Coyote