by Durjoy Datta
The list is a sham. It’s NOTHING. The mail says they want me to understand the two cataloguing classifications, both of which I know since I read about them on the Internet, and see how it’s applied in the Hong Kong Central Library. I’m panicking because I can’t be doing nothing in this city I don’t know anything about; I had planned to either hide in the office, or in my hotel room. I have always been wary about how these huge corporations work; so inefficient.
The room is awfully quiet, beautiful but quiet.
The Internet is incredibly fast, and I check for directions to the Hong Kong Central Library (HKCL). Though I can see it from my hotel window, I want to be sure. After marking the route on the map of Hong Kong they gave me at the front desk, I take a shower, lock my passport and money in the safe in my room and leave the hotel. I am hungry, but I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t want to start this trip by eating something I can’t a) understand and b) digest.
I stand with the map in my hand, trying to make out east from west. I am also frequently distracted by the avalanche of people walking on the pavements, their strides swift and determined, their clothes impeccable, their hair smooth and gorgeous and their skins reflecting the yellow, fresh honey like sunlight.
The weather is pleasant and I start to walk towards the library, making sure it doesn’t run out of my line of sight. Suddenly, I have melted into the crowd. Next to me are children in prams, kids jumping in bright yellow tracksuits, girls in shorts and dresses, women in suits tapping on their phones, moms and dads, college students—but no one is cutting or bumping into each other. It’s chaos, but it’s eerily organized.
The sky looks like a shopping magazine; the LED lights on the signboards that hang overhead the entire road are already glowing red and blue. Just hanging over my head are two signboards that start from the opposite sides of the road and meet midway, one selling Outback Steak, promising to send me back to the Texan lifestyle, the other selling Authentic Japanese Cuisine. It’s the city of signboards and bright lights.
The roads that run past the pavements are narrow, but the traffic moves swiftly, like a snake, halting at red lights, and then accelerating ferociously as it turns green. Unlike India, pedestrians have the first right on the roads, and cars stop dead on their tracks if they see people crossing the road even when the lights are green. I almost died twice.
The bigger the vehicle, the more humbly it rolls. The gigantic double-decker buses, pasted from headlight to taillight with colourful advertisements selling international fashion brands to cell phones to opera and museum tickets, are menacing, but the drivers are smiling.
In the past ten minutes, I have been scared by the buses that thunder past me, turning precisely where they should, like a mammoth with a cheetah’s precision. I couldn’t see the tops of some of the skyscrapers without toppling over; and I have fallen in love with the women with honey skin, brown hair and a purposeful sense of dressing. But I miss home.
There are four passageways that lead to HKCL and I take the one which no one’s taking, the stairs. There is a fountain in front of the library and kids are taking pictures of themselves flashing peace signs, arms around each other. The handlebar of the gate that leads me inside the library has a notification over it: This handle is disinfected six times a day.
The library has eight floors that are open to the public. Eight floors, I say to myself. It’s nothing like Dad’s library; this one has computers, is carpeted, has pillars shinier than mirrors, escalators and multiple issuing desks. I am Alice, and this is my wonderland!
There is pin-drop silence.
I take the escalator to the first floor, which is the children’s library, and it’s filled with books in Chinese and Korean and English, and everything around me is miniature. Little computers, little desks, little wooden chairs, and on them are little kids with headphones bigger than their faces wrapped around their ears; they are cuter than the word cute itself.
I feel like a giant intruding their space.
There is a playroom with a plastic tree and plastic-treeissuing table and small kids with round faces are jumping around as delighted parents watch. There are more disinfectant stations; they make me feel dirty.
The next floor has the adult lending library, which houses racks upon racks of books about literature, history, sciences, architecture etc. It’s like my Dad’s library on steroids. I put my laptop bag on a table, deciding that I would savour the library a floor at a time, one layer at a time.
It takes me three hours to cover three racks of books aptly named ‘Oversized English Books’. They range from History of the World to History of Hong Kong to sports and politics. There is even an oversized version of The Catcher in the Rye. It reminds me of the first time I read it, it reminds me of home, of Dad, and of Mom.
Holden Caulfield, the seventeen-year-old from The Catcher in the Rye, crowds my mind, and I start to feel like him, alone in the city where no one’s listening, only slightly happy and mostly distraught, missing his family. But he whines and I am not whining, for I am imagining myself not moving out of this library for a really long time.
I spend the next six hours at the library.
8
If the elevators in Dad’s library are Indian-made mid-level sedans, the elevators at my hotel are like racetrack Ferraris with nitrous oxide cylinders. It only takes me seconds to reach the thirty-third floor from the ground-floor lobby.
So far I have only eaten a sandwich in the last twelve hours, and even though my sensory organs are mauled by a million delightful smells and sights of food from countries I don’t even know the capitals of, I am anxious about ordering the wrong thing. Hotel food can be trusted, I say to myself, more so because the guy at the front desk understood me earlier.
The lift lobby has eight elevators and a lot of mirrors. I presume people like to look their best before they board a lift.
Ting!
A lift farthest to my right opens and I run before it snaps close. I press the button to my floor and start counting seconds. I am on my fifth second (seconds go slower when you count) when I see the reflection of the girl behind me on the lift’s door. She’s leaning on the mirror, standing there nonchalantly like she’s not the most beautiful girl ever to walk the face of earth.
She’s staring straight ahead. Her hair, brown and golden and with big, wavy curls, falling all over face, reaches down to her shoulders. I am not sure where she’s from, because she’s too fair, and her eyes are a curious shade of green and blue, but her earrings look Indianish and the tattoo on her hand is in Devanagari script. She’s dressed like a hippy—harem pants and a heavily embroidered kurti, beads wrapped around her wrist, lots of them. Maybe she went to India for spiritual purposes after having too much of the Black Eyed Peas or something.
She’s leaning back but I can make out she’s not tall, around five feet three inches I would reckon. I am hoping she doesn’t spot me looking at her reflection. In her presence, I feel rather inadequate and insufficient. I also feel kind of breathless.
The seconds slow down further.
10. 11. 12. 13.
The button of my floor is still glowing. I notice that it’s the only one glowing on the entire panel. She is also going to my floor! Suddenly, I am a mush, a pile of nerves and muscles, and I am sweating. I get my shit together and concentrate on exiting the lift without tripping over anything and getting my face busted open.
30. 31. 32. 33. Ting!
The lift doors open and I walk out, forcing myself not to look back. I hear the shuffling of feet behind me, all the way to my room, and after a few seconds, I can hear another door unlock and then lock again. She’s close by, and that gets my heart into a tizzy.
Back in the room, I call up Mom again and she asks me if I have eaten anything and makes a major fuss when I tell her the truth. Dad asks me to go down and have something right away. It’s slightly cold, so I put on a jacket. I’m not thinking of the girl, but the awareness that she’s in a room nearby
makes me uncomfortable. The bluish green eyes!
I’m back in the lift and I’m going down to the cafe of the hotel. It’s seven and there are already a few people there, eating and talking. There is large kitchen bang in the middle of the restaurant and you can see chefs in their towering white hats cooking in open flames, and though everything looks like it’s burning, it smells like a feast. I take a seat close to the window, away from everyone else and watch the cars zip past on the flyover which is only about four arms away from me.
I order a ramen soup, because it has chicken and eggs and noodles in it and I can almost eat the picture printed on the menu. I start reading Maharani by Ruskin Bond, the unchallenged maharaja of short stories; but this is a novella which charts the life of a prodigal yet charming queen, and her relationship with Ruskin Bond. It retains the charm of his magical short stories that I have grown up reading. Maharajas getting nibbled to the bones by pet rats, philanderer drivers shot in their heads while still entwined with queens in amorous embraces, impotent kings and sex-starved queens, it’s all there.
I am reading this because I don’t want to be seen, or talked to, and books have always been my friend when I have wanted that. The bowl of soup and ramen and chicken arrives, with two chopsticks by its side, and a soup spoon—no forks.
After a careful examination of the people sitting around me, I hold the chopsticks and snap them like the claws of a crab as I try to grab hold of a bunch of noodles. My grip loosens and I drop the chopsticks into the bowl. The second and third attempts yield the same result. A three-year-old sitting at a table to my left is using chopsticks like Samurai swords, very disheartening.
I am really hungry now, almost salivating like a rabid dog into the bowl. Finally on my fourth attempt I manage to wrap around my chopstick, a never-ending noodle and somehow slurp at it long enough for it to reach inside my mouth. I chomp on a piece of chicken, and momentarily, I am in heaven.
I hear someone giggling. Damn it. So much for being invisible.
My eyes dart from left to right, scanning the place like an MI6 agent, looking for the one who giggled, so that I could eventually, well, do nothing with that information.
And then I see her sitting with earphones dug deep into her ears, three tables away from me, looking straight ahead and not at me, but still giggling. She has a coffee cup in front of her, which she takes sips from once in a while, without looking at it.
I get back to my reading and finish the last few pages of the book. I am getting better at using chopsticks, snapping them like a blindfolded ninja catching pieces of chicken mid-air. After I am done, the waiter gets me the bill and I sign it. The girl is still sitting there bobbing her head to the music, occasionally sipping her coffee, looking in no specific direction. There is a constant smile on her face, like Mona Lisa’s, there for an unknown purpose, timeless, beautiful.
The book ends, but I don’t want to leave the cafe, so I order a coffee as well. It arrives and I start reading the newspaper that’s on my table, stealing glances at the girl from time to time. Next thing I know, she’s gone. I curse myself for getting distracted by an article in the newspaper which wasn’t even interesting. I ask for the bill again, sign it and run towards the lobby. People are looking. I always think people are looking, even when I know they are not.
I find her standing in the lift lobby. The lift reaches the ground floor and I am still running to get there. Just before the golden gates close, I slip my hand in and the doors retract. She’s leaning against the back of the lift; the light on the thirty-third floor button is glowing.
‘Sorry,’ I mutter.
‘It’s okay,’ she says. I look at her in the reflection again. Oh. My. God. Those. Eyes.
12. 13. 14. 15. The lift’s moving too fast.
I am staring at her on the polished doors of the elevator. Her lips move, she says, still without looking at me, ‘Are you from Kolkata?’ Her voice is smooth, without kinks, like whisky. I have never had any but I hear it’s smooth.
‘Huh?’ I look at her. ‘From Delhi. But I am a Bengali. How do you know?’
She turns her face towards me, not exactly towards me and says, ‘You smell like Kolkata.’
I am thinking stale fish and dirty sea, unwashed clothes and dingy lanes, and I ask, ‘How?’
‘You smell old,’ she answers and looks straight ahead.
33.
I walk ahead of her as she bides her time. Not looking back, I walk to my room, wait for the door of her room to be unlocked and locked again, and only then do I enter the room, fall flat on the bed and think about her wavy hair, her whisky voice and the accent, slightly Indian, slightly alien. I doze off on the bed too large for me thinking about her. I smell old.
It’s only 9 p.m. when I wake up. I am hungry again, I guess because I have nothing else to do. Gathering up the shreds of courage and self-respect that I am left with, I fire up my laptop and close my eyes and wait for the words to come to me. Zilch.
There are only three things that come to my mind. 1. It’s going to be predominantly autobiographical and 2. A part of it is going to be a love story, so that’s going to be fictional and 3. I am already contradicting the points I am sure about and 4. I am never going to write the book and 5. I said I had only three things in my mind . . .
Three hours of staring at a blank screen yields one paragraph, no more, no less, about a hundred words. I read these words repeatedly, and though it isn’t brilliant, world-changing, metaphor-laden prose, they are still the first few sentences written by me:
As he entered the hotel, luxurious and opulent beyond his zaniest dreams, he felt privileged, spoilt, and even lucky. More so when he found himself next to a girl who was beautiful, fair and proportionate, like a goddess and the figures in Da Vinci’s sketches. He wanted to make sure it wasn’t one of his open-eyed dreams. They were on the elevator to the top of the hotel, and he could see them, the girl and him, riding together into the sun, like the elevator of the chocolate factory that broke right through the building and floated into the yellowness, the yellowness of the sun, the yellowness of Hong Kong. Aha! Hong Kong.
I read and re-read my sentences, and then I sleep like a child.
9
The phone’s ringing again. It’s Sameer from ATS, Hong Kong, but he’s calling from the US. Life’s fancy like that; sitting in a hotel room in Hong Kong, I get calls on the landline from a senior who works in Hong Kong but is stationed in the US for a meeting. Am I cool or what!
‘Hi! I hope you’re having a great time in Hong Kong. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there. But you need to go to the office once. Ritik, my colleague, will see you there. He will tell you what sort of work we do at ATS, Hong Kong. You can add that in your project report,’ he says in a monotone. His voice is so boring, it’s good he’s a million miles away.
‘Sure, sir,’ I say.
‘Fine. Do what he asks you to do,’ he says and disconnects the call.
Google Maps places the office fifteen minutes away from where I’m staying. The thought of using public transport petrifies me. It’s already eleven. I am not a heavy sleeper and I never stay in bed after seven, but there’s something about the mattress, it’s as if it’s made of roses and sleeping pills.
The bathtub invites me, but I’m the praying mantis, with long legs and shit, and I’m a young man so I shower instead. I pick the best shirt of the three, moisturize my face till it’s slick like butter paper, lock my room and head out. I walk slowly, deliberately, hoping to bump into her again, but I’m alone in the lift. So alone.
After confirming the address at the front desk, I leave the hotel, where every employee smiles at me, their eyes disappearing in happiness and crinkles of their skin. They make me feel wanted and that’s new. The subway station is a ten-minute walk. The roads are still crowded with people, dressed far better than I am.
As I get into the subway, I notice that the entire population is on touch devices, tabs and iPhones and iPods, and when I say entire, I
mean the word literally. A series of long, winding escalators take me down to the Customer Service window where I buy an all-day pass for tourists, just in case I feel brave enough to act like one. The Metro isn’t much different from the one I board in India. It’s as crowded, just that here I don’t feel molested and like I am being smashed to a pulp.
The building isn’t hard to find. It’s a hundred-floor building, that’s ninety-eight floors more than my apartment building in Delhi. The ATS office is on the thirty-fourth, thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth floors of the building, and I set a new record. Yes!
Ritik is waiting for me near the reception. He’s a short balding guy, much like R.K. Narayan’s common man in a shiny, fitted suit. He’s fit though, and he breaks out into a big smile when he sees me, and then he crushes my hand in a firm handshake and says, ‘Welcome to ATS, Deep. You’re so tall!’
‘Thank you,’ I say. For years I have been looking for a repartee to when people call me tall but I have not come up with one yet. So for now, I just keep staring at the top of his head listlessly.
‘Let me show you around the office. Have you been to our office in Bangalore?’ he asks and I shake my head. ‘It’s pretty much the same, but we have a lot of people from Hong Kong working here.’
I nod. He shows me around the three floors of the office, walking swiftly between cubicles, waving to people who are peering into fancy computers with two screens. The conference rooms are occupied, the people are sharply dressed. And contrary to what I had expected, the Indian representation here is pretty low.
‘So what do you want to do? I heard you have a mail with instructions to go by? Show me,’ he says and points to the laptop on his desk. It’s an ASUS gaming laptop with a keyboard whose sides are glowing red. Attached to it are sparkly Skull Candy headphones. Ritik’s not as dead sexy as Aman, but he’s definitely cool.