Author: Ram

Numbers tumble, float across,

Rows of shadows long and noisy

On the edges of an A3 sheet lay

licking fingers, scratching heads.

These books are collected, sorted and organised in racks by the librarian lady. She walks with her trolley, pushing it with one hand while holding books on the other. Does she read the books she handles each day?

Can anyone ever read all the books that look at us from these shelves? Some are sitting tight, pushed by their neighbours, some stand with a slightly slant angle, unable to bear the weight of their companions. A few brave ones face me with their title page crying, “READ ME!”.

Some say, “Pick me up”, politely. Some stand with stylish poses, while a particularly thick lady there looks weary, perhaps no one touched her for a long time except the librarian.

In them are wrapped consciousness of authors, living and dead, shut to silence until anyone opens their chapters. They wait for anyone to flick their pages to switch them on.

One sentence, one word even, can change a person. When he needs it, when he absolutely deserves it, a book appears in his life.

It never leaves him.

Madhu was in the class room. The desk had scratches and markings everywhere. He sat, slouching a bit and looked up. The wooden beams crisscrossing the large, ninth standard A section class room had markings, scratchings and writings. They were not Thirukurals. Lewd and rusty things said by fourteen year old boys over the years. How did they get up there ? Did they scratch on it before it got erected?

Vignesh came back from the playground. He looked and breathed tired. He smelled too.

“Move aside, da! I have to complete it before the mad man comes”, he said. “Did you finish?”

“Oh, I know. You would have finished already!”, he kept charging at Madhu without waiting for a reply.

He then jumped over Madhu’s back and landed on the bench. He put his hand under the table and unearthed folded foils of white sheets. His style. He didn’t like notebooks like the rest of them. He wrote in pieces of paper and clipped them, stapled them, sometimes even knitted them with twine threads. He was messy.

Madhu checked the blackboard. The blackness brought about by the cleaners in the morning was long gone. It was grey. The white chalks and multiple erasing in the morning class by the physics teacher Vanan. Chalks. Well, chalks were all over the place. Small, rounded missiles they became at the hands of the always-angry teachers.

Vanan, the large-teeth fellow, carried his cane always and wrote his equations with a screeching sound that swallowed all the silence of the class of hundred and five boys, all stunned by his whirling sound of whiplash.

He liked to pick up on Vignesh, his favourite. He would ask the trickiest of questions at the most unexpected times – when Vignesh dozed off for a mere millionth of a second.

“Sir! Sir! Sorry Sir!…”.

Whip. Whip.

“What is Newton’s second law of motion?”

“Sir! Sir! I don’t know, Sir! Please sir!”.

Whip. Whack.

“Just coming to school every day, well dressed, filling your stomach, and like a donkey, carrying bag full of books, but not opening them, ever”. Vanan’s caustic remarks were directed at the whole class. It was a prefix to the violent act that followed.

Taking in a long breath after uttering each phrase, swinging his cane up in the air, pausing a moment for pure theatre, swinging it down while breathing out and lurching towards the poor boy, he lashed at his buttocks at an angle tangent to the convex, tender flesh.

Vanan laughed like a yoga guru and a warrior, all in one.

“Sir………r!”

Vignesh was more moaning than pleading. The last sound of the afternoon physics class.

It was quiet ever since. The whole class wrote “F=ma” one thousand times as an imposition, in white sheets, notebooks and soiled scraps.

It was Newton’s law but Vanan’s regime.

I am at the Quyeanbean library. Specifically, my hands are on a white table engulfed by a green fortress of a desk partition blocking an old window overlooking an old city. A city they say, is one of Australia’s historic inland cities. The city looks like a country town. I say that even though I never lived in country towns, never visited them much. Perhaps my impression of a country town is from cowboy movies where lean Clint Eastwoods stand in the middle of a mud-dirt road holding a gun, eyes wrenched, with a hat obstructing cold, grimsome looks.

I take a sip of the flat-white-with-one-sugar. One sugar, I always insist. I never check what or how much the barista adds to the cup. I don’t even know the composition of the so-called flat white. It’s not white. It’s brown. Well, I don’t even know that for sure, I drink with the lid closed. It tastes brown. And it’s not flat by any means. Flat means bland, spineless, tasteless. This coffee is hot and deceitful. This coffee, or the first sip of it, already induced enough neurochemicals in my system, enough to make me write this piece, sitting at the desk, leaning closer and closer to the page, my hands scribbling squiggles of blue ink on a yellow page, my breath bouncing off the page, mixing with the slice of coffee I just ingested. My elbows are squeaking and slipping by the shake and thrust of my writing hand.

I write a lot these days and I seem to flow on forwards by a stream of consciousness, dwelling on the moment. My face is stiff, lips curled, eyes clasped on the topic that I found or made sense of, from the string of last few words imprinted on the page. My hand isn’t stopping, it suddenly relishes the attention it’s got. It is writing and at the same time being written about.

Who is writing?

It is 1:30 in the afternoon, the radio is on, placed on the table – the only table in the house. Paati(grandmother) has just settled down on the kattil (bed) with a double pillow. I am sitting down, on a mat, opened my geography book. Listening to the violin’s pull and swings (Carnatic music), I was bored. I hated it, but also liked it for some reason. It made me feel sad. The music itself, and the fact that I am alone at home with Paati, not with my “friends” who might be doing more interesting things like playing cricket or climbing trees – things I suck at. The reverberating music caused paati to doze off almost, yet I cannot sleep. I look at the ticking wall clock – it is stuck at 2:20 for a long time. I like watching the second-hand tick tock its way around. The clock has a funny face. It laughs at me. I am offended. I go back to my book. The stomach cries out a few burps. I slightly relax my posture. From sitting straight on the floor, I now lean back to my left using my elbow as the balancing fulcrum of my body – which all of a sudden says fuck it, and goes full horizontal.

The song diminishes, the literals are repeated – the vocalist says “sa”, and then “re” and very soon switches to “sa” but he doesn’t say “re” – he sticks to “saaaa” and so it goes. The violin stays strong, the percussion instruments – a mridangam and a ganjira – sounded so tiny and diminished that the vocalist must have shushed them to the background. I cannot see them – a TV in the house was still a few years away. But on that Tuesday, on a warm and sultry afternoon, floating on the floor under a twirling ceiling fan that made a hiss at every turn, my mind slipped on the words from the book which was about South American Inca civilisation, its mountains, how arid the conditions for agriculture were, and reading big words like “metamorphosis” and what not.

The violin was wailing now, and the vocalist had receded to the background. The mridangam and ganjira were talking to each other through their beats. How can they repeat each other so correctly? I dwindled, diminished and descended on a slope that slowed me down, until the music and my mind came to a complete stop.

Oh I better wake up. I have to finish this lesson before I can ask Paati to let me go play outside. The clock still laughed when it moved its second and minute hands so slowly at me. It keeps at 2:20 still. Is it playing with me? Oh, no it is 3:20 now. But it is still laughing. Paati snoring and I am looking at the hissing ceiling fan and it slowed down suddenly, circling slower and slower until it stopped.

Power cut.