The day of a million butterflies

She becomes the same quiet, lost kid of 7 years. Joy merges with hollowness merges with sadness. The others are still new here. She wanders away from the sunny terrace into the cafe listening to amateurish thumping on the drums and desperate blowing of the flute. Omnipresence of musical instruments, great food and the most interesting people in cafes is most commonplace here. She had smoked with a British tantrik, played backgammon with a Swede and beaten him to win cheese-cakes, and learnt to knit from a French dreadlocked hippie girl over a plate of Rosti. On this day though, she is just looking at a book shelf where travelers picked a book from, and kept the one they just finished reading for others. 

Ah, Marcovaldo! Calvino's Marcovaldo! So elusive, so difficult to find a copy of in Delhi. She could never afford expensive fancy shmancy book-store books. Daryaganj patli gali Sunday book market was for her. Unaccounted running away to the hills without informing parents didn't help with the finances either. So, she feels the knot of desire in her heart. It is a used copy. She loves used copies with the yellowed pages turned on edges by previous readers. If one's lucky, they sometimes even leave tiny notes between pages. Alas, she does not have a book to keep back on the shelf. She's still reading the one she has in her jhola. Now the knot of guilt in the stomach. Book-readers' ethics are the only ones one must care for. But what is it about desire that makes one do things that one understands to be, if not wrong, then entirely not right either. She picks it up, carries it to the terrace and starts reading, sipping her ginger-lemon-honey with absolute nonchalance. The others want to leave now to trek to another cafe higher up on the mountain. The one you need to cross a waterfall to reach. She refuses to part with the book. She is, after all, the same 7 year old who would open up peanut packets to read if she could not find a book in immediate vicinity. It is also her father's favorite story to tell about her. Someone tells her it is alright to keep it for now. And she believes what she wants to and keeps her Marcovaldo in the jhola. 

{The hills: "It's been four and a half years since she was here last. She is indebted but hasn't returned.  She has gone further away to a different country, a different continent. Maybe next time she comes running to the hills, she'd put a book back in the shelf. Maybe her Kafka she carries everywhere. Kafka, she carried even that day."}