Sir

-I will call you after lunch, maybe?
-Yes.

It was 11:00 am on a Monday morning and I was returning from two consecutive Discrete Mathematical Structures lectures on Pigeonhole Principle and Generating Functions with a two page Tutorial Sheet in my left hand, a pen in the right pocket of the pair of jeans I was wearing and my phone in the right hand, disconnecting the call from my girlfriend. Hungry and irritated, I climbed the stairs to my room located on the third floor of the dilapidated hostel in the esteemed Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. If you look at the top view of the hostel, it was a symbol that contemporary Germans hate and Hindus love for different reasons of the same origin. My room was located at the end of one of the arms and therefore I had to cross 13 rooms with 13 individuals residing in them to reach my abode. The strongest memory I have of hostels is that of walking through the melange of sounds of music and television series and cinema that was perpetually present in the air of the wing. ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ mixed with ‘Science, Bitch!’ mixed with Atticus’s speech in To Kill a Mockingbird.

The lunch started at 12:30 pm and I had exactly one and a half hours to spare before I would be joined by the audience of the melange and would together go to the hostel’s mess for a pathetic tasteless lunch. It was called mess for a reason. I had a choice to make about how to spend those one and a half hours – to complete the Tutorial Sheet for an afternoon lecture on Stochastic Processes or to read A Fine Balance.

—

– This semester we’ll be reading five books, two by authors of Indian origin – A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
– Whose Midnight’s Children?
– Salman Rushdie. The other three books are The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and the last one is a collection of poems by Robert Frost.

It was the first lecture of ‘Contemporary English Literature’ and I was puzzled as to how Robert Frost fitted the title of the course.

– Sir, how are Robert Frost’s works, contemporary?
– They aren’t.
– Then why are we reading it?
– Because the interpretations of poetry are never time bound. They were contemporary ages ago, are and will be, forever.

At the end of the lecture

– Can you please stay back?

I was taken aback.

– Yes, sir.

After the class was vacant except the two of us, I stood with a bag on the right shoulder, holding on to its strap as if it was my only saviour against the unknown danger that stood lurking at me. Well, not exactly stood lurking, he was sitting on his wooden chair, with his reading glasses on, shuffling through the contents of his briefcase.

– Ah! Here it is. Here, take it, read it and return to me the next week with a poem composed by you on what you feel is the central idea of this novel.
– Why?
– Because you are clearly not convinced by the answer I gave you and I want you to know it for sure. If I am unable to do so, I would have failed as a teacher. After all, if I can instil some literary analysis to the minds of mentally affluents, I would be more than happy.

He said this with a smile so warm and a tone so humble that I had the same comforting feeling that you get when you wake up and realise that you still have two hours to sleep before the alarm goes off.

– Thank you.

I approached the door to get out of the hall when he said

– I want the book intact. Not even a single dog-ear of curled cover corners.

I didn’t look back, but smiled and raised a thumb of approval. I knew he smiled too.

—

You never know when you are creating a memory. But when you know this fact, you start getting better at predicting, with increasing probability, what could possibly become a memory. You are the creator of your memories for the audience who is nothing but your future self. Your life, in totality, is a symbiotic relationship between two people – you of the present, bursting to talk more and do more and you of the future, looking back at the talks and the actions and thinking about what all of it meant. I get scared when I think about this idea, the idea that an old man is looking at me in pictures and in thoughts, asking me to do things, maybe differently, maybe in the same manner, and that I, unable to hear him, am living the memory as it is happening – an experience that I will always pine for but never achieve – for there is no such thing as a time-machine.

I knew that this moment would definitely be a memory for the both of us. Holding hands, facing each other, we came incredibly close, looked down, breathed heavily and our foreheads touched, and as they touched, my eyes closed. We were standing by the lake where no one came except the birds. I had traveled overnight to meet her and tell her, finally, how much she meant to me. And of course I carried Norwegian Wood with me. It was the book my literature professor had given me, which I was supposed to return today along with a poem about its central idea. However, I had decided to bunk two days of classes and combine them with a weekend to travel to Calcutta and meet her. I had read only half of it and in order to hold her hands, I had put it on the ground beside me.

My breathing was still heavy when she moved her face a little and out of instinct I went forward and smelled her hair. Our hands were one. I did not know which finger was mine and which was hers. I had never kissed her before, or anyone in the past, and at that time all I felt was a sudden craving to kiss her cheeks and slowly move my thumb near her labial commissure. And that I did. And as I kissed her, she slightly moved her left foot and I heard a sound of something hitting the water. We were at the edge of the lake and the book was immersed. I pulled it out. We sat on the bench, waited for the sun to set, and the book to dry.

—

– Sir, I lost the book.

It was at the end of the lecture that I went to him. I was ashamed of telling him that I had the book but with puffed up pages with stains and curled cover.

– Oh! You didn’t turn up in the last week’s lecture. Where were you?
– I went to Calcutta to meet my girlfriend.

I still can’t think of one reason convincing enough that would explain why I told him the truth. But he

– Oh nice! What does she do there?
– She is a Chartered Accountancy student sir.
– Do male Engineering students have perpetual hots for girls from Commerce?
– (I smiled that just touched the boundary of getting converted into a laughter) I am not aware of the consistency and validity of this fact, sir.

When I look back at the conversation, I realise how diligently he was trying to wipe off my guilt of having lost the book.

– I am sorry, sir. I actually did not lose it. I dropped it in a lake and now it’s all puffed up and spoiled.
– Good luck reading that.
– And I did not write any poem about its central idea.
– What do you think is the central idea of whatever you have read of that book.
– Memory, sir.
– That’s the wisest answer I have heard in a while. All I hear is Despair, Hope and Love.
– One thing I feel about interpretations, sir, is that there are as many interpretations as there are people in this world.
– Well, note that down. It’s an imperfect but a nice-sounding line.

Obviously, it was imperfect. Multiple people can obviously have exactly same interpretations of, say, a mosquito bite.

– So, you didn’t create poetry? Well, what did you create then? Something should come out of a wet book, bunked classes and a trip to one’s girlfriend’s city.

—

I will always remember this college, not for its top notch technological education that it boasted of but, for the amazing company of people I had there and the courses on English Literature. I made the choice of reading A Fine Balance that morning in those one and a half hours. Today, when I sit on my desk every morning in my study-room, and construct the lives of characters and reply to mails from my publisher and agent, I am not helped by Proposition Logic but by hours of lectures and self-study on literary criticism and analysis of great works of literature.

When we sit and ponder over what our lives were when we were kids and the unrestricted, unabashed, fearless young decisions we took, my wife and I still are reminded of that sound when the book hit the surface of the water. We are reminded of the confusion of which finger belonged to whom and the touch of our foreheads.

—

– Memory, sir. I, we, created not poetry, but memory.
– Norwegian Wood was written in 1987. Your action in 2009. Robert Frost wrote ‘Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night/ Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight’ somewhere in 1896. What, then, is contemporary and what not?

—

The book, Norwegian Wood still stands erect on our bookshelf, puffed and curled with the delight of an afternoon of love created and looked back by us, together. The book also is a reminder of him, now dead, and how he cultivated my life, our lives – unknowingly or knowingly, only he would know.