The Weight of a Hundred Unread Titles

You go in the next day. The air smells of dust and binding glue. You find a copy of a travelogue about the Konkan coast, water-damaged at the top, marked down to thirty rupees. You buy it. You buy five other books, just to have something from the place. The woman at the counter, her sari pallu tucked neatly at her waist, gives you a twenty-rupee discount without looking up. The transaction takes less than two minutes.

You start reading the travelogue that night, propped against your kitchen counter while rice boils. The prose is earnest. You learn the names of four fishing villages you’ll never visit. You finish it in three sittings, the damp pages leaving a slight warp in the spine. It sits on your shelf. You do not develop a sudden passion for travel writing.

The bookstore becomes a pharmacy. White fluorescents replace the single yellow bulb. You buy aspirin there once, during a migraine, and the stark brightness hurts your eyes. You stop taking that route home. You take the longer way past the *pani puri* stall, where the vendor knows you now and always adds extra *sev*.

Two years later, you are helping your niece clean out her college hostel room. She has a stack of novels to donate. You flip through the top one, a thriller, its margins filled with her bright pink annotations. You think, abruptly, of the woman at the counter. You never learned her name. You never saw her face in full light, only in the shadow of that single bulb, her fingers tapping the final total into a calculator with faded numbers. You realize you have forgotten the exact shade of the shop’s blue door.

You stack your niece’s books neatly in a cardboard box.

The travelogue is still on your shelf. You haven’t opened it again.