The Library

I had been staring for quite some time at the old man sleeping before his book in the library. His hands were stretched out, as they clasped the edge of the table, supporting him as if he went to sleep while making a difficult decision. His wrinkles agreed with the covers of old encyclopedias. I could hear him breath from where I sat. His posture was a summary of tedium. There were two tattered dictionaries open before him, and a loose sheet, on which I suppose he was making some notes. His purposeful sleep had a rhythm which went well with the softening afternoon. His eyes were clamped shut, as if by an act of will, made easier by years of iron discipline. He seemed to tell me a story, sleeping there like that, which ended a little later when it started raining.

His story was so ordinary it fit neatly into the groove the afternoon had set for it. Somehow when I sit in that library, I like to imagine stories flying around in the air. As if they belong to no one. His was exceptional in that way, for it challenged the pre-existing order among the airborne pieces. In a sense, his was more permanent. Unlike the restless stories which hovered around me, his did not wish to escape. It had his personality behind it. I glanced out of the window, wishing I was outside, doing nothing. I don’t remember how long his narration took. I could hear an imaginary hum when I set my ears to the old wooden desk. His story had the same smell, as if it had spent a lot of time there, in the consolation provided by the old desk.

The library had no purpose. It was a meaningless jumble of ideas. The books had been misused by the benevolent. It stood for a kind of ritual. Old men would sit there, writing lengthy treatises on particular words of obscure languages. Some would scrutinize the indexes of heavy books. In that flurry of activity, my narrator was a dignified intrusion. He clearly didn’t belong there, since he probably didn’t belong anywhere, except in the deep recesses of the splendid afternoon. He had come in the morning, thinking he would spend the day here, not knowing what to do now that his wife was gone.

The afternoon tingled my skin. It had that quality, of beautiful, uncertain afternoons, that carry a taste of guilt. I smelt the book before me. His loose sheet fluttered, its corner under the giant dictionary. It made an irritating sound. An older man at a nearby desk raised his head slowly and stared intently at it. The sheet fluttered in clear defiance. The narrator slept, as if comforted by the sound. His story was at once riveting and distracting. It was so real it made me desire the sinking sun outside. The leaves began to reflect the colors of dusk. The evening brought with it the regular sorrows.

His wife had been disfigured by repeated surgeries. She held stoically on for a greater part of the abuse, placing her faith in knowledge. Towards the end he couldn’t bear to see her. He had loved her as ordinary men do, chuckling occasionally at his faithfulness. She finally died one afternoon trying to remember something she had forgotten. He came to the library the next day, as if searching for something he had misplaced, not quite sure what to do with his existence. His wife had died in the living room, and his initial reaction had been to continue his reading. In a couple of hours he called the doctor, who acted as if something had happened. There were a lot of people, and he chose to go out for a walk.

His story was a fantasy. It had an uncertain structure, as if he was narrating it for the first time. He repeated himself often, and asserted certain observations as if they stood true in all instances. It wasn’t merely a narration. It was as if he was angry. Angry at the listener for listening. For most part I found him rather unimaginative. To deal with loss we seek the consolation of myths. But his rational self refused to alleviate the pain. There was no one to tell him that sorrow isn’t a duty.

His story, with its wild flights, seemed opposed to his own life. But if you thought a little, you would notice the similarities. A simple kind of fantasy is often all there is to an ordinary soul. Limited as he was, even in his dream, he did invite my contempt somewhere at the beginning of his narration. But as the evening brought in my own sense of helplessness, I began to soften towards him. All men aren’t storytellers.

I heard the sound of rain. It had been an incomplete monsoon. The skies had taken on a forgetful posture. The gods clearly weren’t sure. Maybe they too found it difficult to make decisions. The library, ensconced in the imaginations of old men, served no purpose. It was another space in the corner of the mind, transcending only to find the same old battles, and thus sinking back into the tapestry of ordinariness. The rain was brief. The trees made a show of shuddering. The lights were unaffected. The wet roads refused to socialize.

I looked at him to see his hands folded before him. He was still asleep. But his posture was radically altered. It seemed more resigned now. He was bent forward, as if finally resigned to an idea of nothingness. Had he the imagination to find some mystical quality in these ambivalences he may have derived more pleasure at this stage. But his stubborn practicality made him brittle to reality. Or maybe this wasn’t all that real. The rain was real. It could be terrible.

It doesn’t matter, he sighed. It is strange, this life, it means nothing. Just decays at the end. A glaring, dark hole.

I looked out at the evening. The rain had stopped. Water puddles smiled across the street. The sky darkened to a night.