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A Delegation
WE STOP AT 3B. We invite Reeni along. And she says, yes, yes, she’ll come and we are three again. Reeni has brought us sticky tamarind sweets. We pucker our lips over their mouthwatering sourness.
Our flip-floppy chappals slip-slap-slap down the stairs and into the compound, under the coconut palm and the frangipani tree that drops its pink and white flowers on top of the istri lady’s booth.
“What’s chasing you chickens?” she demands.
“Do you know where Book Uncle lives?” I ask.
She throws her head back and laughs out loud before whirling around to spit a stream of betel and tobacco juice at the ground behind her. She turns back to us with a red-toothed grin.
Wapa says that stuff can kill you. I don’t see the istri lady ready to fall over yet.
“I know where everyone lives,” she says. Then she bellows, “Selvaraj!”
Her son runs back from the corner tea shop where he’s been chatting with the autorickshaw drivers. He rushes to a smart stop, like a soldier reporting to his commanding officer.
Selvaraj takes over the ironing booth, and the istri lady marches us down the road and left at the petrol bunk. Past Celebration Sweets and the La-la-la Restaurant. Past the Mercury Medicals lab and pharmacy, three doctors’ offices, a dentist and a phone repair shop which is also a phone-fax-Internet-copy place. All the way past blocks and blocks of houses and apartments we go, to a tiny little house that has almost disappeared under the leaning-down branches of a giant mango tree.
I knock on the door. We wait. Shuffling noises sound from inside the tiny house.
Then, “My goodness me.”
Book Uncle opens the door. His eyes blink at us from behind his fat glasses.
“A delegation. What a surprise. Come in, come in.”
The house is so small that when the istri lady and Reeni and Anil and I step inside, we fill it up. There is only enough room for Book Uncle, the four of us, and the shelves and shelves of books.
What a lot of books! Hundreds and hundreds of them. Boxes of books are stacked on the floor, with just enough room for a person to walk around and between them.
The book smell in the air turns me dizzy with joy.
When I grow up I will line all the walls of my house with books, just like this.