LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      He held out the book and pointed to the margin. ‘Do you have more like this?’

      The bookseller looked distracted. It was nearly five: a tide of commuters would soon spill past the stalls, towards Church-gate and the trains that would take them home. The heat lingered but already the light was changing: it was finer, more golden. From the sea, at the end of the road, there spread a pale brightness, as though the street and the bookstalls were a mirage that would disappear with the sunset.

      The thin young bookseller glanced at the open page, where handwritten notes in blue ink danced next to the sober type. ‘You’d have to check,’ he said. ‘I can’t say.’

      ‘What’s your name?’ the customer persisted. He was a tall, broad-shouldered fellow in his fifties, grey-haired, with steel spectacles on which the last light glinted; there was something pleasant about him.

      The bookseller raised an eyebrow. ‘Uday,’ he said. He turned to stare past the customer’s shoulder. At the Flora Fountain crossing, they had started to flood this way: the white-shirted, briefcase-carrying tide. The traffic light held them back.

      ‘I work just nearby,’ the customer went on. ‘At the post office, the GPO, near VT station. I’m a letter writer, Mohan Karekar. You’re new here, I haven’t seen you before?’

      The bookseller grunted, his eyes on the approaching crowd. ‘I’m looking after the stall for my brother,’ he said.

      Mohan put the ten-rupee note into his hand. ‘If you see more like that, with the writing on the side, keep them for me,’ he said. He walked into the pressing wave of commuters. He was taller than most; the bookseller saw the back of his steel-coloured head for a moment. Then a fat man with a briefcase stopped at the stall. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face all over.

      ‘Da Vinci,’ he said urgently.

      The bookseller bent and picked up two copies of the pirated book, each with a slightly different cover. ‘Complete,’ he responded. ‘Every page is there.’

      Mohan walked through the crowd, crossed the wide junction, and passed under the long porch of the American Express Bank. The arcades were a nightmare at this time of day, but he navigated his way through the continuous stream of people.

      Where the arcades ended, outside the McDonald’s, he waited for the traffic to pause. There was an extraordinary sky today: a bright, deep blue like butterfly wing, with streaks of orange that reached towards the west; it was framed by one of the arches. No one seemed to have noticed; there were trains to be caught.

      He crossed the road and walked between the stalls selling office clothing – consignments of white shirts, spread out helplessly on tables – past the bus stand and the side entrance of the station, to the tarpaulin and the gnarled, mythic-looking banyan tree where the letter writers sat, next to the pigeon shelter. It was all right; their tables were chained and padlocked in place, and one of the others would have left his things – sealing wax, muslin, packing needles, the directory of postal codes – at the shop nearby. He patted his shirt pocket, where his train pass was a reassuring flat surface; in his back pocket his wallet was undisturbed.

      A group of pigeons flew out of the old tree and into the sky, their wings making the sound of wind on the sea; they crisscrossed each other and made for the west. He tucked the new book under his arm and returned to the station, where a Harbour Line train was pulling into platform two.

      When he woke in the morning his wife was still asleep. In the half-light he saw the back of her neck, a few inches away. At the nape, fine hair curled; one shoulder rose under the sheet into a hillock that sheltered her face. The perfume of her neck, which had astounded him when they’d been newly married, was unchanged: intense, overripe; lotuses mixed with ash.

      He

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