And when night fell, and there was nothing really to do. Amir comes into his room, slouches in the chair that has developed a depression at the edge from all the whole-day sittings he has been doing on it for the past two months (two-and-a-half months to be more precise, or maybe three months even). Even my chair has a depression now, he often says with a tired laugh, and picks up the Borges book he’s been on for two days too long, regardless of its impossible thinness, which had made him remark at first sight that it would be the shortest book he would ever read and that it wouldn’t take him one more hour than the nine hours he said it would, the precise number announced with the surety of someone who had aced mathematics all through middle school and even all the way through the tangles of high school, of one who’d even checked the calculation run in the mind against a quick fiddling with the nearest calculator in general vicinity.

But the book as you see is taking too many hours. Now he lifts it and opens it up not at the pages that the bookmark’s in between, but at a page where he had slipped it in early the day before—a tiny rectangular tongue of a paper found without searching that now contains written on it in a black crabbed hand “a man, after four years of trying to comprehend its existence, comes to the emphatic though melancholy conclusion that universe exists;” and further down in a different colour it has more, even more illegible writing, preceded by ellipses, added seemingly to clarify: “without any charitable doing on his part”; and through the haze of this almost mystifying and baffling outlines of the story begins another reading of it that goes along fine for the first few pages, only to break because of a cockroach.

Damn insect! he shouts (it’s not midnight yet), and under the white light of a single bulb that affords the room the kind of mysterious air the moon offers to some avenues on those rare occasions when poets from a time long in the coming duel, knowing all too well that there are times for fist-fights as there are for fights to do with words of simple constructs and straighter and even simpler meanderings, when they duel, sunk irrevocably in that potent brew a-boil in the cauldron filled with every last emotion there is and drowning in the pallid colour—the planet suddenly becoming the orbiter, the orbiter the planet, and the contest or combat taking place in one of the cold-ass concave craters that’s more a concave crater in order just to draw the combatants toward one another than anything.

A similar illuminance persists now, as Amir takes a torn length of last Sunday’s paper over to the roach stealthily, gaining composure until at last the paper is dropped, after which he steps on it for a good five seconds or so and goes back to the book pronto, not caring to even sideline the dead squashed thing; but he goes back only to as quickly come off it again, this time

the diversion being a long-forgotten book review brought now to mind by a word or a phrase or a sentence or a thought or a trace of a thought (that’s Borges for you), the book in question being one by a doctor of the brain, making it his personal (even professional, some would say) business to give the kind of peeled-eyeball retelling or inventory you could otherwise only expect in maybe books by detectives who also manage to read some literature every now and then, but especially in the scenes of crime (mostly for the thrill of it, they always say), maybe under the nearest lamppost, as the policeman who came along has gone back to fetch the forensic people and because there is nothing else to do just then, reading and thus sinking as it is into the bog lain carefully recounting humanity and its wretchedness or humanity and its fuckedupness or its craziness or immaturity that never goes away, alone in the night in the cordoned-off part of the street without giving one single thought to the shadows that lurk or otherwise lay around.

Reading reading reading that kind of retelling so that later they can write similar (because even two A’s consecutively drawn by the same hand are not exactly the same while even black and white can be similar) kinds of heartless rendering of the human insecurities and caprices that one can only expect at the hands of the greatest of masters, who and whose great sprawling book Amir thought back to when, on the first reading of it, this book review mentioned comparisons and likening to neurosurgery to bomb-diffusing, but, as it is, with the life of someone else’s at risk, like thrusting into the darkness, into the unknown, where the only way to try to find the way (which isn’t the antithesis to losing the way because whatever the futility one faces when intending to find the way, there’s always the going astray) is by leaving behind a trail of botched surgeries and injured patients, very like leaving behind or dumping into the of-no-return cesspit unborn words and strangled ideas, the unfortunate outcome either of a womb that just couldn’t stick it out through the endless days of abandonment, or of a space where the air is either so dense it’s veritably like breathing in iron in chunks or where it is so rarefied that the case with the dense air seems a much likelier a prospect, a strangulation involving no ligature marks, only pages ripped-out or with cigarette ash scattered over or with corners dogeared, where the burning ends of so many other cigarettes touched them the way a violin touches the faraway lands we’re always in exile at, the smell of the ensuing burn now old: old like the surgeon whose book is yet another testament to the fact that every undertaking in the wide world is basically just one of the various faces of literature (“they are being pursued by death, and I am trying to at least cloak the shadowy figure arriving toward them”, what thrill!).

His age the only thing his bone-dry

honesty is attributable to, honesty—or rather bravery—of the sort that is required for any of us to come to terms with the fact that life is inherently dull, ordinary and that literature is dangerous and scary and compulsory, like what Baudelaire once said about an oasis of horror in a desert of ennui or boredom which might seep into all your empty spaces as you read through page after page of the doctor’s account of his surgical stage fright, his distaste of seeing and talking to the patients pre-operation, which more often than not leaves shadows the likes of which when remembered can only make shivers jump around like blood in someone who’s been handed a khukuri to even out things at the bhatti, shivers that accompany when light is insufficient and shadow people hide and seek behind backs and when you realise, as Borges says, there are more things, but that’s fear or excitement or anger… which more than anything is a result of raw untrammeled emotions, and that’s where patience, endurance comes in (since one should never act without thinking), but an endurance to all of this necessitates bravery, that one little trait sufficient to cull the great ones, those who face misfortunes with the dignity of a poet and choose life while still choosing many other things and who know in their heart of hearts that literature is literature and life is life but also that literature is life, and here our boy is reminded of the abandoned story, which he promptly returns to but which doesn’t engage him as much now.

So he opens up at the bookmark and after some time realises there’s nowhere he can get to with the book right now.