Mukesh watched Nikhil weave his way in and out of the crowds. Finally, he presented Mukesh with a blue bag, teeming with greenery. Okra and mung beans aplenty, but many other bonus vegetables thrown in too. They didn’t call it ‘Variety Foods’ for nothing.
Mukesh said thank you, quite quietly, and jostled back through the shoppers to the street, where cars were tooting and beeping, their windows open and music of all kinds blaring out.
When he reached the top of his road, he began to walk ‘briskly’, helped by the downward slope, unlocked his door, hobbled to his kitchen and unpacked his groceries (bonus veg today: spinach, coriander and a bread roll or two, perfect for pav bhaji, which Mukesh had no clue how to make). Finally, he sat himself down in front of the television.
Usually, on a Wednesday, he’d unpack his shopping and then sit on his chair with his feet up, drinking a cup of hot and just-right-sweet chai, as Naina used to make it (now made using ready-mix sachets), and he’d plonk himself in front of Zee TV or the news, to keep his eyes away from the empty chair beside him, Naina’s chair – and to fill his ears with sound, laughter, and stern conversations, important world affairs, to keep his mind away from the deafening silence that had welcomed him home every day for two years now.
For months after Naina’s death, Mukesh hadn’t been able to sleep in his own bed, because being in there alone felt like being in someone else’s home entirely.
‘Papa, you take your time,’ Rohini had said to him at first, and Vritti had set up a bed in the living room for him.
‘He can’t sleep there for ever, he’ll do his back in,’ Deepali had whispered to her sisters after tucking him in. A strange role reversal that made him feel an immense sense of shame. How could he be whole again when his whole had gone for good?
‘He’ll be okay. He is grieving. I can’t bring myself to go in the bedroom at all, but we’re going to need to clear Mummy’s stuff away. She kept it so messy!’ Rohini whispered back.
Lying on the living-room sofa, Mukesh had shut his eyes, hoping to block out the sound of their laughter. Soft, comforting laughter. He was the father; he should be looking after his girls. But he couldn’t. He didn’t know how to without Naina.
Once a year had passed, and Mukesh Patel’s Time of Eternal Quiet had begun, that silent, lonely stage of grief, where everyone but you had moved on, Rohini, Deepali and Vritti had insisted on finally clearing out Naina’s room. ‘Papa, we’re not letting you put this off for any longer. It’s time for you to move forward with your life.’
So, they began sorting through the detail and debris of their mother’s life, reorganizing the organized chaos Naina thrived in. Deepali, who conveniently had dust allergies, opted to cook a lunch for them instead. For that one day, his house was full of life again – but for all the wrong reasons. As he listened to Deepali mixing batter in the kitchen, he stood in the doorway of his and Naina’s bedroom watching Vritti and Rohini. They didn’t know he was there. He was silent and invisible in his own home, a ghost of himself.
Rohini took the lead, shouting instructions to Vritti to root out the boxes under the bed, while she dashed around the room, returning a comb to its rightful place in a shoebox on the top of the wardrobe, folding up shawls and tidying them away into a big wheely suitcase, and packing away handfuls and handfuls of bangles. Mukesh watched as they dragged box after box out from under the bed. Vritti knelt to the floor, her cheek pressed against the carpet, and ran her hand to the left, and to the right.
All of a sudden, there was a clinking, clattering crash.
‘Oh, God! What have you done?’ Rohini groaned, staring down at her sister. Vritti pulled the box out, revealing a now half-emptied yoghurt pot of mismatched earrings. Next came the Clarks shoebox of photographs that had entertained them all for hours on end when the girls were little, sitting on Naina or Mukesh’s knees, asking about their paisley patterned clothes and garish flares. Mukesh had always thought they looked rather fashionable. The girls laughed at that.
Then followed several pieces of empty Tupperware. And finally, one lonely, dust-covered library book.
Vritti slowed her pace for a moment and held it in her hands, as Rohini knelt down beside her sister.
‘Papa,’ they called, loudly, still oblivious he was only a few feet away. Deepali trotted into the room then too.
‘Mummy’s book – well … library book,’ Rohini said. ‘I thought I’d returned them all, but I must have missed this one.’ She held it up to him and he walked forward, not quite believing it. As though this dusty, icky, sticky book was some kind of mirage. When he’d seen the other relics of her life, he’d barely felt a thing. But here, seeing this book, the grey dust sticking to the plastic cover in splotches, it was like Naina was here in the room with them. Here, with his three girls, and one of Naina’s beloved books, for a moment, just a moment, he didn’t feel so alone.
Once upon a time, a huge stack of library books sat on Naina’s bedside table. They’d kept her company in her last year. She’d read the same ones over and over again. Her ‘favourites’. Mukesh wished now that he’d asked her what they were about, what she loved about them, why she’d felt the need to read the same ones again and again. He wished that he’d read them with her.
And now all he had left was this one library book: The Time Traveler’s Wife.
That night, with the room devoid of Naina’s mess, Mukesh cracked the spine, feeling like an intruder. This wasn’t his book, it was never chosen for him, and perhaps Naina would never have wanted him to read it either. He forced himself to read one page, but had to stop. The words weren’t making sense. He was trying to turn the black letters and yellowed pages into a letter from Naina to him. But no such message existed.
The next night, he tried again. He put Naina’s reading lamp on and turned to page one once more. He flicked through the successive pages, trying to be gentle, trying so hard not to leave his own mark on this book in any tangible way. He wanted this book to be Naina, and only Naina. He searched, forensically, for a clue – a mark on the page, a drop of chai, a tear, an eyelash, anything at all. He told himself that one day he would have to return it to the library – it’s what Naina would have wanted. But he couldn’t let it go. Not yet. It was his last chance to bring Naina back.
He took it page by page, chapter by chapter. He met Henry, a character who could travel through time. Through this gift, he could meet a past or future version of himself, and it was also, importantly, how he met Clare – he travelled in time to meet her when she was just a girl, and returned again and again over the years. The love of his life. And Clare had no choice but to love him, because he was all she had ever known.
He began to see these characters not as Henry and Clare but as love itself – that kind of love that feels fated, inescapable. That’s what he and Naina had. Eventually in the story, Henry leaps forward into the future and learns he is going to die. He tells Clare he knows when it will happen, when they’ll be separated for ever.
As he was reading about Clare and Henry’s tragedy, the phone beside him had begun to trill. It was Deepali. He’d not been able to speak, he could only cry.
‘I knew she was going to die, my beta,’ he said to her, when his voice could finally escape. ‘In the same way Clare knew Henry was going to die in that book. They could almost count their last days together. I had that warning, too. But did I do enough? Did I make her last few months happy?’
‘Dad, what are you talking about?’
‘Your mummy’s book – Time Traveling Wife.’
‘What about it, Dad?’ Her voice was soft, he could hear the pity ringing through it.
‘Henry and Clare … you know … they loved each other ever since they were very young, just like me and your mummy. And they knew when he was going to die. And they lived their lives as best they could, making the most of every moment. I don’t know if I did the same.’
‘Dad, Mummy loved you, and she knew you loved her. That was enough. Come on,
now. It’s late, Papa, go to sleep, okay? Don’t worry about it at all. You gave her a good life, and she gave you a good life too.’
Naina had died. But this book felt like one little glimpse into her soul, into their love, their life together. A snapshot of the early days of their marriage when they were still all but strangers to each other. Married, with no idea of what the other one was really like. Naina would do everything – she’d cook, she’d clean, she’d laugh, she’d cry, she’d sew, she’d mend, and at the end of the day, she’d read. She’d settle into bed as though she’d had the most relaxing day, and she’d read. From their first few weeks together, he knew that he loved her, and he’d love her for ever.
I’ll never be lost to you, Mukesh, she said to him then as he gripped the book in his hands. He heard the words. Her voice. The story – it had brought her back – even if just for a moment.
As Mukesh reaches for the remote control to continue today’s routine, his hand collides with a book. The Time Traveler’s Wife was staring up at him from the sitting-room table. Time to go to the library, no excuses, the book whispered to him, in a voice that sounded uncannily like Naina’s. It was time to leave this book behind, to move forward. Now, it was time.
After a few deep breaths and a little stretch of his legs, he stood up, tucked the book into his canvas bag, checked his pockets for his bus pass, and headed straight out of the house, up the hill. He crossed the road at the traffic lights to get to the closest bus stop. He waited, struggling to read the timetable.
A young woman was standing next to him, with a messy bun and a huge mobile phone, held in two hands.
‘Excuse me, where on earth is the library and which bus would I need to get, please?’
The woman sighed and began to tap the screen. He had irritated her, he would have to find out another way, but, squinting, he couldn’t make out any detail on the map. He would be here for ever.
‘You’ve got to get the ninety-two from here,’ the woman said suddenly, making Mukesh jump. ‘It’s in the Civic Centre.’
‘Oh, no! Surely there is another one. The Civic Centre is so full of people. Too too busy for me. Can you check again?’
The woman chewed her gum loudly, grumpily. She looked at her phone. ‘I don’t know. They’re all closing down round here, aren’t they, the libraries?’ She inhaled sharply. A moment later: ‘Yeah, okay, there’s Harrow Road Library, down there – same bus. You’ve got to cross the road though.’
‘Thank you, thank you. I’m so pleased.’ He smiled at her; and then, against all the odds, she gave him a smile back. As he stepped off the kerb, in his excitement he had forgotten how slowly his limbs moved – he felt a stabbing pain in his knee. The woman grabbed him, firmly but gently, ‘Chill a bit, you need to look both ways first.’ She checked right, she checked left, she checked right again and gave him a nudge when the coast was clear.
On the other side, he turned to look for her, his hand held up in a wave. But her bus had arrived, and he was already forgotten.
As the 92 came to a stop in front of him, he clambered on, pulling himself up onto the deck with all his might, tapping his Oyster card on the reader. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to the driver, ‘please tell me where to get off for the Harrow Road Library.’ He enunciated the words as though it was a Highly Important Place of Interest. The bus driver looked at him blankly.
‘Ealing Road stop,’ he replied eventually.
‘Thank you, my friend, thank you. Today’s quite a big day for me.’
Chapter 2
ALEISHA
‘ALEISHA,’ THERMOS FLASK DEV tapped his hand on the desk. ‘I’m out for the rest of the day. Look alive a bit, if you can. I know this isn’t Tiger Tiger or wherever you kids like to go these days, but people still expect good customer service here.’
Aleisha was slumped over the desk, her expression moulded into her ‘resting bitch face’, as her brother so lovingly liked to call it. She looked up at Thermos Flask Dev, without bothering to sit up to attention. Thermos was her manager. A tall, rather scrawny, sweater-vest-wearing Indian man who could be irritating, but over whom she also felt slightly protective. In the library he was The Boss. The librarians ran around after him, trying to please him, even when he was just sitting in the corner drinking from a Thermos flask (she always wondered if there was actually booze in the Thermos flask because they had a swish – well, sort of – coffee machine in the staff room. Why would he need to bring his own?). But outside, she imagined that he shrank by half, because the outside world, especially Wembley, wasn’t quite so accepting of Thermos-flask-drinking-all-year-round-sweater-vest-wearing men who loved to boss people around. She worried people might shout at him on the street if he was walking too slowly, or barge past him and spill his ‘coffee’.
‘Don’t worry, boss, it’s completely dead today.’
He raised his eyebrows at her, but he couldn’t disagree. A few children, whiny and loud, had been in earlier with their uninterested parents. They’d taken out one book each and promised to pay their overdue fines the next time they came in. Those fines (20p and 67p) had been sitting on the account for the past three months, set to become fines forever unpaid. Aleisha let it slide – she had no urge to police this. This wasn’t her dream job (was it anyone’s?) – she was just working here for the summer. She’d finished her exams in May, so this was literally the longest summer of her life.
‘Do people even still use libraries?’ her schoolfriends had asked her when she got the job. So quiet. Dying. Boring as hell. She’d tried for a job in Topshop in Oxford Street – for the discounts and for a chance to get out of Wembley for a bit. But this is where she’d ended up. ‘It’s a place of peace,’ Thermos Flask had said to her after her interview. ‘We pride ourselves on that. Lots of libraries have been closed down recently, I’m sure you’ve heard all about it, and we’re doing everything we can to highlight to the powers-that-be how vital this space is for our community.’ His arms were open wide, basking in the library’s stuffy silence. ‘Lots of our regulars come here for that lovely sense of quiet companionship, you know? Your brother used to love that about this very special place too, didn’t he? How is your brother?’
Aleisha nodded and shrugged in response. Her older brother, Aidan, had worked here when he was her age. ‘The people are endlessly fascinating,’ Aidan had said to her when she’d told him she’d actually got the job. ‘Like, just watching people sit and be quiet, or browse, or whatever, when they don’t realize they’re being watched … It’s like, I don’t know, no one’s trying to be someone they’re not in a library.’
Aleisha hadn’t understood his fascination. Aidan had always been the bookish one. He was studious, often learning for learning’s sake; whereas she did her work only to get the grades, and would never have just curled up with a book in the way he used to.
Their mum would bring them here on the odd occasion as children, and Aleisha couldn’t bear the silence. She’d kick and scream, wanting to run around in the park just outside. As they’d grown older, Aleisha had never made her way back to the library by herself, but Aidan used to head there after school, sometimes to do his homework, but mostly to read books for fun.
So as soon as Aleisha said Topshop wouldn’t take her, Aidan had suggested the small, quiet, musty Harrow Road Library. She was sort of doing this job for him, hoping, in some small way, to make him proud.
‘I’m off out too, Aleisha, you’ll be all right on your own for a bit?’ Lucy, one of the two library volunteers, scooted out from between some shelves. Thermos said there just wasn’t enough funding to actually employ any more staff – there wasn’t enough of an incentive to have two perfectly good libraries going, when the Civic Centre one was super swish, so they needed to do all they could to cut costs whilst also providing ‘the best service possible’. Lucy had lived in Wembley for years, and Harrow Road had been her go-to library, when it was fully funded. She loved to talk about the good old days, when children would pile in at
the holidays. ‘This library used to be so full and vibrant, you know, Aleisha. I like coming back here a couple of times a week, it just brings back memories of my little ones. They became readers here.’ Lucy loved to reminisce. She’d told Aleisha this story at least fifteen times already, always saying, ‘Stop me if I’ve said this before.’
‘It’s quieter these days, kids playing Xbox and stuff, I guess!’ Lucy continued. ‘My little ones, though, they inhaled every page they got their hands on.’
One of Lucy’s kids had gone on to run her own hair salon, opening up two or three in the area, and they were doing really well. The other had trained as an accountant working for some law firm in the city. Lucy was endlessly proud of them, and always put it down to ‘this library’.
‘It’s so peaceful today, isn’t it?’ Lucy looked at them both, throwing her summer jacket on, and wandering towards the doors. ‘The perfect day for chilling out with a book,’ she winked at them. ‘I’ll see you next week!’
It was peaceful. Lucy and Aidan were both right about that. But, with peace, came boredom, and today was a real struggle.
‘Maybe,’ Thermos Flask said, turning to Aleisha as he reached the door, ‘you could look through the returns pile? You need to make sure you take out any scraps or bits of rubbish. Some of our regulars’ – What? All five of them, Aleisha thought to herself – ‘have complained about finding bits and pieces stuck in the pages. There are latex gloves in the drawer. I know Kyle usually enjoys this job, but it would be a huge help if you could get it done today.’
Of course goody-two-shoes Kyle loved the gross, super-diligent jobs. She thought about ignoring his instructions completely … but she looked around, surveying the room. Silent. There was a guy reading in the corner; a mum and her toddler in the children’s section, all getting on with their day. No one needed her. Her phone sat on the desk: no new messages. The old clock hanging above the door said one thirty. She still had hours and hours left and, with nothing to do, time would seemingly stand still. So, she pulled out the desk drawer, put on two latex gloves, all clingy on her skin, and got started.
The Reading List Page 2
