Notes in the Margin

The first note appeared on page 41.

Ira had borrowed The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter on a rainy Tuesday because it was the only novel on the returns trolley with a spine that wasn't cracked. She was twenty-six, a copy editor who corrected other people's commas all day, and she read the way she lived: carefully, with a pencil in hand. When the narrator claimed that the sea had always been kind to her family, Ira made a small mark in the margin. Hm. Is she lying?

Two days later, when she renewed the book, there was a reply beside it, written in neat pencil.

I think so. Have you noticed she never says what happened to her brother?

Ira stared at the page. Somebody else had borrowed this book in between. Somebody had read the same line, felt the same itch, and answered her.

She looked around the quiet reading hall of Saraswati Public Library. An old man dozed over a newspaper. A schoolgirl was counting her coins at the photocopier. Behind the desk, Mrs D'Souza was stamping books with the slow, comfortable thump of a woman who had done it for thirty years.

Nobody was looking at her.

Ira picked up her pencil. Yes! And why does she keep describing the lamp but never the light?

She slipped the book back onto the trolley and told herself it was ridiculous.

By Friday the reply had come.

Maybe because the light is the part that left. Chapter 6 is going to hurt. You have been warned.

That was how it began. Over the next three weeks, the book travelled between them like a very slow, very careful letter. She would borrow it, read two chapters, scribble her thoughts down the margins. He, because by now she was sure it was a he, though she could not have said why, would borrow it the next day and answer. They argued about whether the brother was alive. They agreed that the ending of chapter nine was too convenient and that the dog was the only honest character. They started to leave other things between the lines: a joke here, a confession there.

I am bad at beginnings, he wrote beside chapter ten. I am very good at the middle of things.

She wrote back: Beginnings are overrated. The middle is where the tea is.

He wrote: Is that an invitation?

She did not answer that one for two whole days.

It was absurd. She knew it was absurd. She had never seen his face. She did not know his name. Yet she found herself dressing more carefully for library visits, glancing at every man in the reading hall, trying to match him to the handwriting: the slow loops, the tidy slant. She began to wonder if he was the tall, serious man with the tweed jacket who always sat at the window. Or the shy teenager who returned his books a day early, each one handled with a kind of reverence. She decided, with a little pang, that the person she was writing to was probably someone's grandfather.

She didn't mind. That was the alarming thing. She would have gone on writing to the grandfather.

On the last page of the book, below the final line, she wrote: I would like to meet you. But I am scared that if we meet, this will stop being as good as it is.

She returned it on Monday and waited.

Wednesday's reply was a single line, in pencil, so light it was barely there.

Me too. So let's not decide anything yet. Read it again with me?

So they did. They started over from page 1, new pencil colours, new notes. It was in the middle of the second time through, on a bright Thursday afternoon, while she was waiting at the photocopier, that Ira noticed something.

On the corner of the reference desk, beside the new assistant's stack of returns, lay a pile of due-date slips. The assistant was the quiet young man who had started in September, who sorted books all day and never met anyone's eye. Ira glanced at the top slip as she waited, and then she read it again.

Due: 17th. Due: 27th. He crossed his sevens, with a tiny line through the stem, the way people do who learned to write abroad. And on page 112 of The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter, in the margin, every seven had the same small slash through it.

Her pulse climbed. She turned around.

Across the hall, behind the reference desk, a young man in a grey cardigan looked up, as if he had felt her stare. He had a mop of dark hair and the faintest ink smudge on his thumb. He was holding, in both hands, a worn paperback with a cracked cover.

Their eyes met. His face went through four distinct expressions in two seconds, ending with a kind of wondering horror.

Ira walked across the reading hall, and the old man looked up from his newspaper, and the schoolgirl at the photocopier forgot her coins.

"You cross your sevens," she said.

He looked down at his own pencil. Then back up, and his ears turned completely red.

"That is... a thing I do," said the assistant librarian. "I am Aarav. I... I did tell myself I would say hello. Properly. Every day, for three weeks. I got as far as 'Quiet hours are two to four.'"

"That was you?"

"That was me. It is not my best work."

Ira started laughing. She could not stop. It was an enormous, tension-breaking, thoroughly unlibrarylike laugh, and from the circulation desk, Mrs D'Souza looked up over her spectacles and said, in the stern voice of a woman who had noticed everything for three weeks, "I could have told you two in September."

Aarav set the paperback on the desk between them and slid a pencil across.

"Chapter eleven," he said. "I have a question about the dog."