She hefted four Forsyths in one hand, rearranging an untidy assortment of Austen, Maugham and Dickens with the other. Her face arranged itself into a frown, bent from the weight of deciding whether to place Brian Weiss in her Self-help rack or in the Spirituality one. Or maybe it was because she was balancing an abridged Time Machine between her chin and neck. That was when something caught her eye.
She pushed aside a rather formidable War and Peace to uncover a small pile of slim books. An exclamation
escaped her lips, and simultaneously, the Time
Machine, from the precarious grasp of her chin.
Bite-sized books in a series called Great Scientists: those were the cause of her happy surprise.
Yellowing, but in excellent reading condition, still arranged in her favoured
alphabetical order. Albert Einstein. Alfred Nobel. Archimedes. And so on. She
pulled out Marie Curie from somewhere in the middle of the lot, idly flipping
the pages of child-friendly, large print, as childhood daydreams replayed
themselves, unbidden, in her mind. A jumble of conical flasks and beakers and
test tubes, one of them hissing with the nascent fumes of an element just
discovered. Presiding over it all, a girl in an immaculate lab coat. Herself,
of course- not Madame Curie.
Smiling indulgently, she reached far into the recesses of the
next rack, and felt a large volume. The peeling hard-bound cover declared
proudly in fading text on a green background- "Complete works of
Shakespeare". An inscription in the inner flap revealed a relative's name,
and the year, 1968. Memories tripped over one another in their race to the top
of her mind- seeing this tome in an old bookshelf in a faraway attic at a
grandfather's rural homestead. Slow summer afternoons with chattering cousins
making up games, and watching with excitement as tender coconuts were gathered from the palms in the garden by a local expert. Mangoes from the backyard cooled inside a bucket dunked in the
well.
The pages were still intact. She put them carefully aside and continued to wind her way through the shelves, browsing through books of all kinds: Small and concise. Unwieldy and hard to place. In need of mending, but fondly familiar. Large and inscrutable.
And she struck gold. Again and again.
Out toppled an afternoon hidden away in a corner of a
cousin's room. The spoils from a bargain-hunting rampage at a used-books store.
An elocution contest in primary school. Playing truant in a Maths class. A
fascination with a historical figure. A friend who shared her love for a
certain author's murder mysteries. Lectures drowned out by noise from the
Electrical Laboratory. Visits to a much-loved bookshop. Birthdays celebrated.
Train journeys.
To be opened, relived and carefully rearranged. All the memories. And the books, of course.
When the last of them was filed away, she stepped back, to
look at it all in one glance.
Bookrack, perhaps. Pensieve, undoubtedly.
Bookrack, perhaps. Pensieve, undoubtedly.
** with due apologies to George
Orwell
