The Inherited Custody

CHAPTER V

He was his old self, or whatever it meant to be him when he entered the bookstore. He browsed through a spread of books on a separate table that were on sale. Not that plainly cheap books attracted him. He had once purchased a very expensive copy of the latest version of Wuthering Heights and never spoke of it to anyone. What was usually disappointing about such decisions was that they didn't last long— the reading.

Rumi often did that, like he was now, reading while walking, while crossing roads, while eating and busy. And he marched as if he knew the ways blindly, to the places he'd spent most of his life within. Nothing fazed him. Nothing could stall his interest in the lives of others, other than the physical. He walked to his school like that often, even to the garden, to the beach, from university to home, kitchen to the bedroom, hall to his parents room. He never bumped into anyone or anything. Something about that, the secrecy, the mystery towards the divinity of words that managed one to be encapsulated by things debatably real.

He had devoured the words of Woolf, Plath, Desai, Rushdie, Hardy, Oates. His father had told him to read the Americans. The Russians. The Indians were also good in English. Read all of them! He was praised by his teachers for reading (or bully the other students, his classmates) encouraging them to be like Rumi, to read. They nevertheless laughed at him. What a foolish thing for a young boy to do, some said, to read. To waste time, to bury one's nose in books. He read only in English.

He often read Byron, Angelou, Whitman and Shakespeare even if he couldn't understand a single word. These poets were introduced to him by his mother, her collection of tiny poetic volumes. From both the sides of his parents, he received a gift, he believed, to read words of the others, if not many from them. And he was often very grateful for them. An impartation, an inheritance that very rarely occurred in very few people's lives.

Even at the cafe, when he was once with her (wild hair, absurd structure with high hips), when he kept reading, and she watched him, his lips quivering every word, silently loud, his mind echoed, her eyes fixated on him, while the sun brightly glimmered into the opening of the restaurant, she said, "Oh, how can you do this?"

"What?"

"Just read like that, so peacefully. It's like nobody is even here. Not even me."

He silently responded to that, his eyes not even moving at her words.

"Why do you do that?" she asked nonchalantly, smiling at him.

"What?" It was a groan this time.

"Move your lips while you read? Even if it's not loud, you keep mouthing what you read."

"I don't know. Just a habit, perhaps."

"Habit?" She laughed then, at first quietly, then a little louder, as if someone had cracked a joke.

A cringe creeped his face.

"You'll never get it."

She appeared shocked for a moment, her lips apart, her upper fangs barely visible— white, and she smiled some more and said, "Why? Just because I don't read like you, doesn't mean I don't understand what love is," she pauses, her voice gentle, but then swallows with a bulge under her chin and continues, "one can love anyone, anything— it need not be a living object. It could be a place, a language, a book. It is perhaps the most mysterious thing in the world, or most overused, overlooked. And yet, it keeps happening, reinventing itself in the form of people." 

All she got as a reply was a wry smile, a side eye, and a very silent hum. Still, she smiled.

These were the tiny droplets of reasons that things didn't work out. That he never understood her. That he never spoke enough. If only the words he read were the words he was able to form over his rolling tongue.

It wasn't him who failed what they had amongst them. No. If anything, it was his rejection towards her creeping under his consciousness. He never let her become the compulsion that one expected love to become. The way love was perhaps supposed to be. The way a loved one should linger— the memory of their fingers, of their smiles, their voice, the tick of their hearts, the smell of their skin and clothes. The way she remembered him, in physicality— his almond-shaped eyes and tired structure.

Although love still stayed. Whether these things managed to overlap or not, the law of the universe of ultimate balance could not be replaced, that everything existed together, one way or the other, things were bound to happen, aligned with a certain symmetrical order of polarizing sides.

She had given up the idea of Rumi's conviction towards her. Nothing could ever satisfy or fulfill him. He was lost in the heart of a world to which the door was, and would always remain locked. She only managed to amuse herself in their meetings and conversations. And then imagined him as a delicate, wild rose— strong and beautiful at first, but due to neglect and inexperience, withered.

Rumi couldn't make sense out of it— was it by design— meant to never be? When she left for good, he simply realized, everything that seemed precious so easily faded. The stars peppered the night today. Tomorrow, they'd recede.

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