Star gazing in daylight.
A light brown ring, an impression made most possibly by a wet teacup, sat conspicuously on one of her darling book covers. She ran her finger around the outline and pictured her rather careless partner using the book as a coaster, likely while watching Top Gear. She hadn’t noticed the stain before. The book looked seemingly uncomfortable, sandwiched between two others from a genre, she cared little about. To leave a Murakami in between two management books was akin to leaving him amongst her pot-smoking friends discussing the futility of earning money. Or for him to leave her amidst his single-malt drinking friends discussing golf or even worse, the stock market.
She pulled it out and set it free. That’s when she noticed the tea-cup stain. Taking the blemished book in her hands, she opened it and read a few lines. Kumiko wanted her unemployed husband to look for their cat. Toru was in the alley looking for it. She shut the book and set it aside. She looked up and stared hard: at a glance, the shelf looked pretty with colourful spines, arranged not alphabetically, but by their heights, all sitting aesthetically on an antique Indonesian wooden bookshelf. But look closer and one could see how mismatched they all were. Mitch Albom was next to Ernesto Che Guevara, Sukumar Ray next to Madam Krishnan’s South Indian recipes, A guide to Water Colour painting sitting atop Balinese Villas and Naseeruddin Shah looked unbefitting next to Digital Photography for Dummies.
This ‘bookshelf analogy’ made her draw parallels with her life. It made her think of her world and how at a glance everything was so appealingly arranged. Conversely, look from a subterranean level and one could decrypt a sea of conflicts. Quite like how Naseeruddin Shah looked incongruous being in the company of a technical know-how book but seemed to like parking his backside on a grand bookshelf, she too felt conflicted to live and breathe in a country that gave no impetus to a creative and inspired life, inasmuch as she loved the streamlined living the place afforded.
She made a mental note to make the shelf more agreeable for the residing members. She would rehome them, one at a time and put them in company of the likeminded. A date and time was set aside. But the lingering question of how she’d make her life more agreeable needled her. She put off that task for another quiet afternoon, perhaps on a day she had access to better tea.
{When life gets overwhelming, Appudeshwari likes to completely shut down and think of strategies to make it (life) more bearable. But her chain of thoughts never stay restricted to the relevant and run untamed in uncharted spaces. She makes up pointless analogies and stories and then blames it all on Murakami.}
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