Hold my Hand (Penguin Metro Reads)

by Durjoy Datta

‘It’s great. A lot of websites need a lot of things to be written for them. It’s good pay,’ he says and when I look at him in disbelief, he adds, ‘I know what you’re thinking. That why do I look like a homeless person if the websites pay me well, right?’

  I don’t answer.

  He says, ‘If I were to buy new clothes and wear them, and type on a new laptop, and live a new life, I will start feeling new and shiny, and I want the book to be old and rugged, poor and earthly, because after all, I am the book.’ He lights a cigarette. Smoking is not allowed in the library, but he’s special, he’s a genius, and he will be the library’s first homegrown writer, so he’s allowed little luxuries like smoking and drinking tea on his table.

  I am the book.

  I wonder, and I wonder a lot, if it’s because he said these words that they sound exotic. Would they be the same if Wasim, the cricket captain, said them? But I suspect he would add dude and awesome and fuck in the sentence and totally spoil it. I want to call Manasi and ask her if she feels the same when One Direction sings ‘That’s what makes you beautiful’.

  We talk some more about some other authors he likes, and I don’t tell him about my obsession with Henner Jog, and he writes down a few books for me to read on a piece of paper; I thank him. I see the printed stack of papers next to him, crinkled at the edges, fluffed up, and I feel like having my own stack of papers printed and bound with notes on them.

  ‘I need to work now. These website people are really far up my ass with deadlines. I will catch you around, kid,’ he says and peers into his laptop screen. His spectacles slip down. I’m grateful for the chat.

  I walk towards the machines of wrought-iron death, the elevators, and then to my seat and daydream about my own stack of papers imprinted with my words. Almost immediately an illusion dances in front of my eyes, I am surrounded by a wave of books that open and close and mock me for thinking I can write, and then I argue with them, that the book is me and has nothing to do with them, and then they say they are only here to encourage me and poof! They are gone.

  I am the book. The four words are running in my head even as I am reading The Silver Linings Playbook, the book whose movie made the Academy Awards jury jump up in childlike joy. Though I think the book is infinitely better, incomparable even. Maybe the book was the author and the movie was the director, maybe the author was poor and earthly and the director was new and shiny.

  I spend the entire day scrawling on a piece of paper the names of all the favourite characters of the books I have read and what they are like, and I am surprised that I know more about them than I know about the people in my life.

  The only one I know more about than Holden Caulfield and Augustus Waters and Tyler Durden and Mr Darcy, is myself, and as I learned today, I am the book.

  5

  Writing is HARD, and it’s not with just a capital H, it’s with capital ARD too, or maybe even longer words like challenging or difficult or problematic with all their alphabets in capitals, underlined and in bold. It’s been a week since I decided to be amongst the 0.33 per cent people who finish writing a book every year, but all I can think of are the beautiful books I have read, of how I will let them down if I write something pathetic and unreadable. It’s like performance pressure when drowning under the watchful eyes of a gaggle of coaches and parents.

  I have just written half a sentence and it goes like, ‘As he entered . . .’ Post that I felt like death, stationary, stuck in place, and all pervasive. I felt light and disgusted, and soon, I was in a pit of inconsolable despair, clawing to get out. Staring at a blank computer screen is distressing, unromantic, and in stark contrast to feeling imprinted sheets of paper, yellowed by age and use, between your fingers.

  There are 298 listed writers in the Wikipedia page under the category ‘Writers who committed suicide’, and like every list I’m sure it’s incomplete. I shudder to think of the pressure writers are under to not write something that’s hated.

  I have just finished reading Fahrenheit 451, a novel set in the future, when houses and buildings are fireproof, and firemen don’t stop fires, they start them. Their job is to burn all the books and stoke the fires that consume them, one page at a time, one story at a time.

  451 Fahrenheit is the temperature at which the printing paper catches fire and I am that temperature. Anything that I write should catch fire and burn before anyone reads it, because reading it would destroy them.

  And I hope not to destroy.

  I shut down my laptop, dump my register and the solitary printed sheet with half a sentence in my bag, and storm out of the library. I have come to realize that trying to write is the single fastest path to feeling worthless.

  But also, there is a little joy.

  I take the Metro to college, which is conveniently located, at a ten-minute distance from Dad’s library. Today we have Advanced JAVA, C++ and IT security, but I’m not worried about the classes, I’m worried about not descending down the slippery slope of depression and nihilism.

  I am reading a hardback and walking towards the class, wondering if the author battled with mediocrity like I am, trying not to crash into a girl or a lamp-post, but most of all trying not to fall in my own eyes. Often deep in my thoughts, my writing is shallower than the script of Pokémon.

  The book I am reading is so brilliant that I want to cry and throw it away. Instead, I just keep reading, not thinking of writing a book, and soon enough I do crash into a stupid lamp-post, the book flies out of my hand, and I am sitting on my ass, legs splayed wide open. My chest hurts, and a few girls start giggling from a distance. In all the years I have been walking, a perfect upright homo-sapiens-type walk, this is when they choose to notice me, in my brightest hour.

  ‘Are you okay?’ a voice says from behind. I turn around to see Archana, my ex-girlfriend, and she’s not imaginary. Our relationship was brief but it happened.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘This lamp-post here. Stupid lamp-post, always there, never moving.’

  She giggles, like she always does, and covers her mouth with her slender fingers. We were a couple in tenth grade. She was my laboratory partner in chemistry, and I remember that time in slow motion—the two of us running endlessly on a sun-kissed beach with water foaming at our ankles; we would pour silver nitrate and potassium chloride and wait for the imminent reaction, look at the bubbling of the solution and at each other, the invisible dissociation of ions, mixing together, interweaving like my fingers and hers, the precipitation of the silver chloride at the bottom the test-tube, and our fascination with it all.

  We would talk about chemistry for hours at end, for I liked complex benzene rings with methyl groups hanging here and there, and she liked the thirty-something teacher who taught us the subject. Little did I know that we wouldn’t last long. For, I was like an inert gas, unlikeable and uninteractive, while she was like an alkali, combustible and excitable.

  As soon as we stepped into eleventh grade, she opted for Commerce and I opted for Science, and like so many long-distance relationships, ours broke down too; the corridors, the staff room between sections A and F, the water dispensers and the boys with gelled hair drinking from it. It was more than our love could handle.

  I would see her on the bikes of her new friends while I still shared a cycle rickshaw with three of my tuition friends, sitting on the cushionless seat, praying it wouldn’t topple over. Before long, I knew it would be over. And it was, within the first month of eleventh grade. She spent the next two years watching boys play basketball, cheering and smiling flirtatiously at them, rolling down socks to her ankles and putting on make-up while I spent it studying C++ and JAVA and mathematics.

  Now she is doing BBA from my college, and today is the first time she has talked to me in three years.

  ‘It’s been so long since I last saw you,’ she says.

  ‘I see you almost every second day. Your classes are held in the building next to ours. I can see you at the window sometimes,’ I respond.

&nb
sp; ‘Oh.’

  I didn’t mean to make her uncomfortable, but it’s another one of my superpowers, along with my no-writing skills.

  ‘I’m going to the canteen. Do you want to walk together?’ she asks, and I adjust my spectacles, which she understands as a ‘Yes’.

  ‘I heard about your internship and that you’re going to Hong Kong,’ she says. ‘That’s cool!’

  ‘It’s just work,’ I say.

  We walk in silence. I do want to talk about the time I found her licking a rather handsome boy’s face in an empty classroom while she was still dating me. But I don’t think it’s appropriate because she did shout ‘Sorry’ (and that settles it) when I ran from the classroom crying and shouting, ‘MOM! MOM!’

  When I got home, Mom had hugged me and told me that all girls were witches who wanted to snatch her shona away from her. She made me rui maachh that day.

  ‘Do you really see me from the window?’ she asks.

  I weigh the question. It could either be a flirtatious question or it could be to check whether I am a creep who watches girls sitting near the windows. I have two options:

  1) Yes, I think you’re still very beautiful and the fact that you broke my heart and I ate three, not two, bricks of ice cream and rui maachh, means nothing, so please take me back and I will lick your face too, or

  2) You know I just saw you once and figured that’s where you sit.

  But instead I say, ‘I really like your building. Do you know your building is the oldest of the four buildings of our college, and that’s strange because yours is the newest course. It’s ironical, and I wonder if it’s intentional.’ And another voice inside me shouts at me, ‘YOU BIG NERD!’

  ‘Umm . . . okay.’

  Deadly silence, crushing helplessness engulfs me and I want to die. With great power comes great responsibility; my superpower of making people uncomfortable is nothing to kid around with.

  ‘I am sorry about what happened between us,’ she says. ‘We never got to talk about it. You would just walk away from me whenever I tried to talk to you.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Archana. It was a long time ago,’ I say.

  ‘When we were together you were always into your books and never talked to me about anything else,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t understand you a bit back in the day. I am sorry for that.’

  She says it like it’s a bad thing to be surrounded by books and I am not pleased. A little green Hulk pulsates inside me, puffing, nostrils flaring, fists clenching, ready to defend his territory. I stay shut.

  She continues, ‘I don’t know why you read all those books when you can just talk to people and know so much more. It’s much nicer.’

  Her tone is kind and soft and apologetic, else I would have transformed into Hulk by now.

  She says, ‘I know a lot of people who don’t read and are smart and successful and have great careers. I don’t know why you had to be so into books!’

  HULK SMASH! Argh!

  ‘Books make us better people, Archana. It made me into someone who could forgive you for kissing that boy in the classroom, and it would have made you a person who wouldn’t have kissed that boy in the first place. Books make you rectify the mistakes even before you make them. I am not blaming you, for I understand it was your right to find love elsewhere if you didn’t find it with me. Books taught me that. It also taught me that it’s important to empathize with people, because people are complex and beautiful and often irrational and hard to understand, and so are you. And my anger over that “face-eating incident” shouldn’t change what I think of you as a person. It should only make me try to understand you better. When you’re dead and I’m dead and the boy’s dead, we can still live because we become a part of them as much as they become a part of us,’ I say and I’m panting. I am a pretty stupid Hulk; Stan Lee would be ashamed.

  ‘Boy! Okay,’ she says, and flutters her eyelashes and looks at me like I have horns on my head or poop on my face, and adds, ‘you should be a writer.’

  ‘Yeah. Right.’

  6

  My parents and I stare at my suitcase. It looks small and inadequate, and we look at each other, confused. It has three shirts—none of which are world-beating—two trousers, one old jacket, five boxers, a shaving kit, my toiletries, my laptop and its charger.

  ‘Is this enough?’ Mom asks, biting her nails. ‘Should I pack a few packets of Maggi? Some ready-to-eat food? Dry fruits? Anything?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s necessary, Mamoni,’ Dad interrupts. ‘Deep, you should have spare clothes and keep more money. Also, you need to buy a pouch that you can strap around yourself—keep the passport and boarding passes and other documents there. And are you sure you checked you will get the visa on arrival?’ He is checking invisible boxes in his mind.

  I nod.

  I stand there staring at the suitcase. All my life—boring, mundane and everyday—folded and stacked and set in it, and zipped. If one were to judge me by what my suitcase contains, I will come out as a poor guy with no fashion sense. My obituary will read: He had three hideous shirts. He also wrote a one-page, half-a-sentence novel.

  It depresses me to know that I can uproot my life from one city and go to another and all I have to pack is three shirts. On the other hand, Isaac Asimov would need a gigantic trunk just to fit in the first editions of the 506 books he wrote.

  ‘I think that’s all I need,’ I say and switch on the television.

  ‘I will make a list,’ Dad says and starts penning down things I have to take, buy and do, before I leave New Delhi and after I reach Hong Kong. He starts with making a list of all the numbers I can call in case of an emergency. I would rather die than call the relatives whose numbers Dad is noting down.

  Mom is depressed; the zipped up suitcase a constant reminder of the empty house I will leave behind. She cries and runs to the kitchen, which today smells like all parts of heaven.

  I am watching a kung fu movie on television (totally coincidental), where Jackie Chan is ripping through the streets, dancing through the crowd, jumping in and out of taxis, doing somersaults on the trams and on the trains and in subways in a city that could very well be Hong Kong, and it suddenly rings home that come tomorrow, I will be all alone in the foreign city, amidst all the madness I can see on the screen.

  Suddenly, my phone rings. It’s Aman.

  ‘Hey, dude!’ he shouts, the U elongated.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, trying to reflect his enthusiasm but fail.

  ‘So, you’re leaving tomorrow, right? That will be so awesome! What will you get me? And hey, don’t forget to hit on the flight attendants! They’re going to be so HOT. Like, really,’ he says without a pause.

  ‘Air hostesses will be the last thing on my mind. I have never seen the insides of an aeroplane. What if I freak out while the aircraft is in the air and embarrass myself?’

  ‘Shut up, Deep. It won’t happen,’ he says. ‘If you’re so worried, just stay strapped to your seat with a book and wear one of those adult diapers.’

  I’m not sure if he is joking. Aman has more experience in locking himself in a steel cage that floats with other metal cages, vision obscured by sunlight and clouds, 35,000 feet above ground. It doesn’t sound safe at all.

  ‘Aman, there was a movie, Snakes on a Plane. Do you remember?’ I ask, only half-joking.

  ‘Oh, c’mon! That’s science fiction, man.’

  ‘It grossed $ 62 million, so the plot was plausible, right?’ I ask.

  ‘Harry Potter grossed a billion trillion dollars. That doesn’t mean it’s real or plausible, Deep!’ he retorts.

  Harry Potter isn’t real? My childhood was a lie!

  He continues, ‘I think you’re being paranoid. Everything is going to be just fine! Air travel is like the safest.’

  ‘If you say so,’ I say.

  He talks about girls, nightclubs and things-to-do in Hong Kong. He knows I am going to stay locked in my hotel room counting time backwards. The thought of being
away from my parents terrifies me. I’m a mumma–papa’s boy.

  He has read about Hong Kong on Wikipedia and is throwing facts on me, trying to get me excited about the trip.

  ‘It’s the most densely populated city in the world! Imagine being amongst so many new and interesting people,’ he says.

  ‘People scare me. You know that,’ I retort.

  ‘But it also has the most number of Rolls-Royce cars per person! Isn’t that just too cool!’ he continues, trying to convince me.

  ‘It makes me feel poor.’

  ‘Oh, c’mon. Look, it says right here, it has the most number of skyscrapers in the world. Man. If that doesn’t excite you, I don’t know what will,’ he says, defeat creeping into his voice.

  ‘Tall buildings make me feel small and insignificant. Also, tall buildings mean more people.’

  ‘God help you,’ he sighs.

  ‘I’m counting on that,’ I respond and he laughs, and I laugh, albeit nervously.

  We disconnect the call soon after and in spite of his trying to cheer me up about the trip, I end up feeling worse. What if I am in a place where no one understands me, I get mugged and slashed and find myself in a ditch, and I lose my passport and my three shirts? I panic and look up the crime statistics for Hong Kong—for I think a search engine should do all the searching and we should stick to the panicking—and notice that there are fewer untoward incidents in the whole of Hong Kong in an entire year than my district has in, like, a day!

  Dad completes his checklist and goes over it again, holding his spectacles over his nose bridge; his concentration, unwavering. Mom starts feeding me like this is my last meal between now and the time I come back to India.

  I am bat-shit scared.

  The woman from ATS calls before I leave for the airport to tell me that the trip is more of a holiday since most of the ATS colleagues I was to meet in Hong Kong had to fly out for an urgent meeting. She had mailed me an inconsequential and haphazardly put together list of things I should note about the Hong Kong Central Library. The said library looks huge in pictures, and even though the nine-floored building is dwarfed by taller ones that surround it, it stands out.