The Letter in the Library Book
A book of poems comes back to a Warangal library thirty-eight years late. Inside it is a love letter nobody ever read.
The return box at the Hanamkonda branch library was a wooden crate with a slot in the lid, painted green some years ago and padlocked to a pillar on the verandah, and nobody used it except people who were ashamed.
“Overdue,” said Rehana madam, the librarian, every time Sindhu unlocked it in the morning. “Anything in that box is overdue. Honest people come to the counter.”
Sindhu was in her final year of B.A. at the women’s college down the road, and four afternoons a week the library paid her a small stipend to put the old catalogue onto a computer. The computer was slow. The catalogue was a set of long wooden drawers full of yellow cards typed on a machine with a broken letter e, so that every e floated slightly above its neighbours like a word trying to escape. She had grown fond of it.
On a Monday in late July, there was one thing in the return box: a thin hardback wrapped in a plastic carry bag, and folded around it, held with a rubber band, a five-hundred-rupee note and a scrap of paper.
Sorry for the delay. For the fine. — S.
The book was a collection of poems by Tilak, Amrutham Kurisina Ratri, the night it rained nectar. The cloth cover had once been maroon and was now the colour of dried rose petals. Inside the back cover was a paper pocket, and in the pocket was a borrower’s card, and on the slip pasted opposite were three purple date stamps, one above another. The last of them said:
DUE 22 JUL 1987
Thirty-eight years. Sindhu thought of someone carrying a library book that long, from shelf to shelf, house to house, and then one day, for no reason she could know, walking it back to a green crate with a note that said only sorry.
The borrower’s card had a name in fountain pen: S. Sunitha. Member no. 1143.
“Rehana madam,” she called. “Look at this. 1987.”
Rehana madam peered through the bottom half of her spectacles and said, “Five hundred rupees. Not even half the fine. Put it in the register.”
Sindhu was about to stamp the book RECEIVED when it fell open in her hands, the way books do at a place where something has been kept between the pages. Page eighty-seven. A poem she half remembered from school. And pressed flat against the gutter, folded twice, was a sheet of ruled paper torn from a notebook, the edges soft as cloth.
She should have given it to Rehana madam. She took it into the reading room instead, where there was nobody except the old man who came every day to read the Telugu newspapers in order of thickness, and she unfolded it on the long table under the fan.
The ink was blue and had faded to the colour of a vein. The handwriting was neat, careful, a schoolboy’s hand trying to look like a man’s.
Sunitha,
I have put this in the book because you told me you read Tilak in one sitting, without stopping, and so I know you will find it tonight or tomorrow, and I will not have to watch your face while you read it, which I could not bear.
I am not good at saying things. You know this. Every day you come to the counter and ask for something and I stamp it and say “fifteen days” as if that is all I have to say to you, and you say “thank you” and go, and I sit there for the rest of the afternoon composing the next thing I will say, and the next day it is “fifteen days” again.
So I am writing it instead. I think about you all the time. I think about the way you push your hair behind your ear when you are reading the back of a book to decide. I think about how you laughed at the man who fell asleep in the reading room and his spectacles fell in his own lap. I would like to know what you are thinking when you look out of the window. I would like to know you.
If you feel even a little the same, come to the Thousand Pillar Temple on Sunday, near the Nandi, after the evening aarti. I will be there.
If you do not come, I will understand, and I will never mention this, and I will go on saying “fifteen days” as if nothing happened, and you will not have to feel awkward at the counter. I promise.
Ravi
Sindhu read it twice. Outside, a lorry full of cotton bales went past, slow and swaying, towards the market yard.
She did the arithmetic. A book read in one sitting does not stay with someone for thirty-eight years. A book like that stays because it was put away somewhere and forgotten.
Sunitha had never read it. She had never got as far as page eighty-seven.
And on a Sunday evening in July 1987, a young man had stood beside the stone bull at the Thousand Pillar Temple, after the aarti, and waited.
“Ravi,” said Rehana madam, frowning. “In ‘87. At this branch.”
“At the counter. He’d have been the one stamping the books.”
Rehana madam had joined in 1994, so she would not have known him. But there was a cupboard behind the broken photocopier where the old staff attendance registers were kept, because nobody had ever been given the authority to throw them away.
It took Sindhu most of Tuesday. The registers smelled of silverfish and of turmeric, scattered between the pages long ago to keep the insects off. There were only four staff members in 1987. One of them signed every day, morning and evening, in a neat schoolboy hand trying to look like a man’s.
K. Ravi Kumar. Junior Assistant.
In December 1988 his signature stopped.
“Ravi Kumar,” said the old man who read the newspapers, who had been coming to the library since before she was born. “Thin fellow. Glasses. Wrote poetry, very bad. He left to do his M.A. Became a lecturer. Telugu. At the college in Kazipet, I think. Retired now.” He turned a page. “He gives free tuition to children in the evenings. Somewhere near the railway colony. You ask anyone in Kazipet for Ravi master, they’ll tell you.”
She went on Thursday, on the bus, with the letter in an envelope inside her notebook, and nearly got off four times.
Kazipet smelled of diesel and frying mirchi bajji. She asked a man at a tea stall, who asked a boy on a cycle, who rode ahead of her through three lanes and stopped outside a small house with a neem tree in front and a blackboard leaning against the compound wall. Through the window she could hear children chanting the Telugu alphabet, the way she had chanted it herself, the vowels long and sing-song.
He was older than she had imagined, which was foolish, because she had done the arithmetic. Thin, still. Glasses, still. Grey hair standing up at the back. He sent the children home early when she said it was about the library, sat her on a plastic chair on his verandah, brought her a glass of water, and waited.
She did not know how to begin, so she simply gave him the envelope.
He took out the folded sheet. He looked at it for a moment without unfolding it, and she saw that he knew it from the shape alone, from the way the edges had gone soft.
He read it. She watched his face, and then she thought of the line in the letter, I could not bear to watch your face while you read it, and she looked away at the neem tree instead.
When she looked back he was laughing. Quietly, with his hand over his eyes.
“My god,” he said. “Fifteen days. I had forgotten about fifteen days.” He wiped his glasses on the end of his shirt. “This handwriting. I was twenty-four and I wrote like I was in seventh class.”
“She never read it,” Sindhu said. “I don’t think she ever opened the book. It came back on Monday. In the return box. With five hundred rupees and a note that said sorry.”
He was quiet for a while.
“I waited till nine,” he said at last. “At the Nandi. The priest locked the gate and I was still sitting there. I thought, all right. That’s an answer. And the next week she didn’t come to the library, and the week after, and then I heard from someone that her marriage had been fixed, to a man in Nagpur, and she’d gone.” “I kept my promise. I never mentioned it. There was nobody to mention it to.”
“Did you,” Sindhu began, and stopped.
“Marry? Yes. Thirty-two years. A very good woman, who laughed at my poetry, which was fair. She died four years ago.” He folded the letter again along its old creases. “Don’t go home thinking you’ve found a sad old man. I’ve had a good life. I’ve taught nine thousand children their vowels.” He smiled. “But it is something, to know she didn’t say no. It’s a different thing from no. I’m surprised how different.”
Sindhu took a breath. “The return box has a slip,” she said. “You have to fill it in when you leave a book, for the fine. Name and phone number. Nobody fills it in properly. But she did.”
She did not give him the number. She had decided that on the bus. It was not hers to give.
Ravi master looked at her for a long time, and then nodded, as though she had passed some examination he had set her.
“I’d like to borrow the book,” he said. “Only for one night. And then I’d like to ask you a favour, which you are free to refuse.”
“What favour?”
“When I bring it back, ring that number. Don’t tell her anything about me. Just say the library found something of hers inside the book she returned, and she can come and collect it if she wants.” He handed the letter back to her. “If she doesn’t come, that’s an answer too. I’ve had practice.”
On Saturday he filled in a membership form in front of Rehana madam, who looked at him with deep suspicion and gave him card number 4471. Sindhu stamped the book herself, on the slip under the last purple stamp from 1987.
“Fifteen days,” she said, without thinking, and then went red, and he laughed.
He brought it back on Sunday morning, put it on the counter, nodded to her, and went out into the drizzle. Sindhu did not open the book. She slid the old letter back in at page eighty-seven, where it had always lived, and put the book in the drawer under the counter, and at eleven o’clock, with her heart going much too fast for a library, she dialled the number from the return slip on the counter phone.
A woman answered. An older voice, careful, a little hoarse, as if she had not spoken yet that day.
Sindhu said what she had been asked to say. Nothing more.
There was a long silence on the line. Then the woman said, “I’ll come tomorrow,” and put the phone down.
She came on Monday at four, a small woman in a cotton saree the colour of ash, her grey hair in a plait, a cloth bag on her shoulder. She said her name at the counter as though she were not sure it was still hers. Sindhu gave her the book and showed her to the far end of the reading room, where the light from the window was best, and went back to the counter and typed the same catalogue card three times without noticing.
The woman sat there for a long time with the book open in front of her. Once she put her hand over her mouth. Once, Sindhu was almost sure, she laughed. Then she took a pen from her cloth bag and wrote something, and brought the book back to the counter, and thanked Sindhu in a perfectly steady voice, and pushed her hair behind her ear, and left.
Sindhu waited until the verandah was empty. Then she opened the book at page eighty-seven.
The old letter was there. And beside it, tucked into the gutter, was a strip of paper torn from the edge of something, with two lines on it in two different hands. The first was neat and schoolboyish, in blue ink that had not had time to fade.
Sunday. The Nandi. After the aarti. I’ll be early.
The second was small and slanting, in black ballpoint, and it went right up to the edge of the strip and had to bend down at the end to fit.
Thirty-eight years late. I’ll bring the fine.