The Death of A Writer - Part VI

(Part V has been skipped - will be published soon. 

Recap: A writer and a PhD student investigate an incident in a village where the landlord's house is burnt down. They hear that the Naxals are involved, hence they arrange a meeting with them. Subsequently, they meet with the local government officials - the Panchayat Secretary. In the unpublished Part V, an attack on the writer-student duo contributes to them returning to their university town.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 . 

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NELARATNA

I was sitting in my office when the librarian walked up to me and said I had a young lady visitor.

Back then, only selected PhD students were entitled to an office. I wasn’t one of them. My research was barely underway (under an advisor so distant that I could feel the entire asteroid belt whiz past between us) and I was a student of lowly humanities. I used to work out of the Public Library – the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. The name was a misnomer: the collection was modest, certainly not befitting a bibliophile such as Nehru. Also, I still don’t know where the “Museum” is.

The reading room was on the first-floor. This room was vast and rectangular – the sort with thrown-open windows allowing for shafts of light where motes of dust danced dervish-like – and filled with row upon row of benches and tables stacked with newspapers and magazines. Readers were few and preferred to keep their distance.

A month or so after my first appearance, the librarian– a quiet middle-aged woman whose kindness never made it to her eyes or words – took me by the hand and pointed me to an unused ante-room to a long-shut entrance. “For you to use.”, she said.  

The room had a table and a chair, with a window that overlooked our town’s main road. Shelves comprising books no one read lined the walls, giving the illusion of the room being smaller than its dimensions. On that first day, I remember looking from the window to the chair to the librarian’s stern, weary face. Without warning, I hugged her and said: “This is perfect, thank you.”

I couldn’t tell if she was mortified or happy.