‘Even that nasty bastard would do,’ he said, kicking the earth, thinking about an old man he and his friends had once beaten to a pulp. He had forgotten the reason for it, except that the old man had done something wrong, something like trying to hurt a child he had been left alone with.

‘I would explain myself if you were alone,’ the old man had told him when he had bashed his face in. That night, he had gone to bed thinking that his blows were not strong enough as he had no previous experience in beating up people. And he had dreamt something about his arms and legs not following where his mind went. He rarely had dreams because he was in the habit of talking through most of the night, falling asleep late and waking up early. If he could find the old man now, he could have sat across from him and listened to his rationalizations.

Presently, he noticed that he was walking on a lane of packed, dry dust that had branched off the main road. It looked like it was about to rain, and if it did, he could experience that unique, earthy smell for the first time. A small building stood jutting into the lane, and when he saw it, he felt as happy as though he had run into a person. It looked like a shop, just a room and a veranda. He ran his hand over the low wall surrounding the veranda, examined it and sat down. The dust had been wiped off by those who had sat there during the day. Discarded pieces of paper crunched under his feet.

He could read the big letters written on the walls even in the darkness. ____ Memorial Reading Room. The letters spelling out in whose memory it had been set up had faded away. Must be Indira Gandhi Memorial Reading Room, he thought.

‘She was a woman with balls,’ he had said to his wife on the day Indira Gandhi died. His children were named Rajeev and Sanjay. He had never come across reading rooms named after them. Probably because he hadn’t really paid attention—one only sees what one is interested in.

It did not surprise him to register that he had never read anything other than his schoolbooks and newspapers. He only read the headlines in the newspapers and avoided the rest, saying that things had not changed since his birth.

Even the day before, looking at a man sitting in the corner of the canteen with his head buried in a book, he had joked with his friends: ‘Look, what I used to say has come true. Earlier, if you walked around with a thick book in your hand, people would look at you with respect. These days they think there’s something wrong with you.’

The door to the building was old-fashioned—a series of wooden planks that could be raised up. He gave it a shake, testing its strength. He paced the short veranda, anxiously thinking about his wife and children. Worried that he had not returned from work, would she, by now, have raised a ruckus and alerted the neighbours? Or would she have gone peacefully to sleep, assuming that he had decided to work a second shift? He felt bad that his children would be happy in his absence, relieved that he wasn’t there to threaten them and make them do their homework. He had come to know that they were happier when he was not around, and had been giving some thought to changing his strict ways.