Butterflies and Hurricanes

Her bony, twig-like fingers moved along the ridges on her skin. Her wrinkles ran along the entire length and breadth of her face, racing around her forehead, splitting into tributaries at the corners of her eyes, and lining her mouth. She only had a few wisps of cotton candy hair left on her head, and there were probably about sixteen teeth left in her mouth. She thought about how becoming old was like becoming a baby all over again. She smiled. Then giggled at how ridiculous old age makes you look.

On her 91^st birthday, all Nina wanted was to sit on the couch in her veranda and read. She had lost the will for pretty much everything else in life, but the desire to read was something she had carried with her since she was eight.

When Nina was twenty-one, she was enlightened. She read somewhere that every seven years, we essentially become new people, since every cell in our body is replaced by a new cell. Even emotionally, and psychologically, we go through a complete overhaul. It’s basically like saying you replace yourself with a newer version of your old self. The thought excited Nina more than it should have. She felt like she was living her third life, and like her life was suddenly divided into neat chapters, and each new chapter gave her a brand new start. Nina was now on her thirteenth chapter, and she knew this was probably the last one.

But maybe not. You never know. The hordes of unread books on her shelves willed her into living. She felt like she was an obstinate child, who refuses to go to sleep because the stories are so interesting.

One more word. One more page. One more book.

Fourteen hundred and forty two, were the number of books she had read. Three hundred and twelve, were the number of unread books still lying around her entire house. “That’s a little ambitious, don’t you think?” laughed her housekeeper, April. Nina would just smile back and say, “If only I could live a hundred more years.” Good thing she was off for the weekend. She didn’t want her to make a fuss about her birthday.

She picked her copy of The Lowland and sat down on the couch. Her knees ached all the time now, especially in the winter. It was one of those things she didn’t even notice anymore. Like how our olfactory senses get used to bad odour and it stops bothering us after a while. But today, she felt like the cold had seeped into her skin, and into her bones, and was slowly freezing her from inside.

She opened the book and placed the bookmark carefully on the table in front of her. The black and white butterfly-shaped cardboard cut-out was made especially for her by one of her favourite students. “The worst thing you can do, Leroy,” she used to tell him. “is to leave a bookmark stranded within the pages of a book. When you pick up a book, you must finish it. If you abandon it, the bookmark is stuck forever, lost in time and space, like an animal trapped in a glacier.”

As she turned the crackling, yellow pages of her book, she recalled the bookstore where she had bought it. She was with Jeremy, and they were in an old book-store. She was thirty-six then, living only her fifth chapter. She had bought the book because she liked the description, and Jeremy had kissed her outside the store, as snowflakes fell around them. They were wild, the two of them together. When did she last speak to him? She could not, for the life of her, remember.

“There is always a time, and a place for every book Jeremy,” she had told him once, as they sat on the cold floor in her new apartment, having Chinese take-outs. “You can’t make me read a book at a particular time if I don’t feel like it. It’s almost like the book calls out to me. It stares at me and beckons me to read it. Do you know what I mean?”

It took fifty-five years for this book’s time to come. She only had about forty more pages to read, and then she would be able to sleep with the satisfaction of ending a story. She had never stopped reading a book mid-way. Ten minutes later, she was not Nina anymore. She started living another life. She identified with Gauri’s character, because she understood it. Gauri was strong, and selfish, and a recluse.

She did not understand people who did not question anything. People who did things because they had to, followed rules because they are supposed to, and never challenged authority. She had lived her entire life trying to find answers, trying to make sense of everything around her, which made her a complex, eccentric, difficult person. But she never regretted anything she ever did. She was never a ‘family woman’, and she never felt she needed to be surrounded by people during the ‘difficult’ times. Non, Je ne regrette rien. She did whatever she did, because there was no other way she could have lived her life. It was that simple.

Nina finished the book, mustered all the courage in the world to get up, walk to the bed, take the bookmark out and place it on her side table. She got under her covers, sighed, and fell asleep.

She dreamt of what was to come. She saw the light. Her body trembled under the covers. She had had a feeling all day long. The cold had finally reached her soul, and now she was succumbing to it. She wouldn’t be able to live her fourteenth chapter.

One more word? One more page? One more book?

“Maybe next life,” she thought to herself, and all the pain in her bones finally receded.