I Bought a Used Book and Met Its Previous Owner
Her name was inside the cover; curiosity did the rest.
The book cost less than the bus ride home, and it changed two lives, neither of them the author's.
I found it at the Sunday pavement market, in the row where the serious booksellers give way to men selling whatever the monsoon left them: a 1962 hardback of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, spine held together with tape gone the color of weak tea. I bought it because I was twenty-six and stalled, and everyone I admired kept quoting Rilke at me like a prescription.
Inside the front cover, in blue-black fountain pen, someone had written: "Margaret D'Souza, 1974. Keep going."
I did not read Rilke that night...
I read Margaret.
She had argued with the book in pencil, fiercely, in the margins of nearly every page. Where Rilke tells the young poet to ask himself in the most silent hour of his night whether he must write, nineteen-year-old Margaret had written: "Yes. Now what?" Where he praises solitude, she had written: "Easy for you. Try solitude in a house with six people and one table." On the back endpaper she had kept a tally, in neat schoolgirl columns: magazine names, dates, and outcomes. Fourteen entries. Fourteen rejections, or worse, "no reply." The last entry was dated 1979.
After 1979, nothing.
And tucked between pages eighty and eighty-one, a black-and-white photograph: a young woman on a scooter, laughing at whoever held the camera, a book pinned under the strap of her satchel. On the back, penciled: "M., before everything. 1975."
I want to be honest about what happened next, because it does not flatter me...
I became a mild lunatic.
I read her marginalia more carefully than I have ever read Rilke. I held that photograph the way you hold evidence. There are people who can put down a mystery like that, stories in secondhand books that simply trail off mid-sentence, and I have since learned I am not one of them. The name was uncommon enough. The city was findable, because one margin note complained about a specific church bell interrupting her reading, and there is only one church in this city with a bell that rings at ten past the hour, a fact I confirmed by standing outside it like a fool with a stopwatch.
The rest took three weeks and one parish newsletter. Margaret D'Souza had taught English at a convent school four streets from that bell for thirty-four years. Retired. I wrote her a letter, because it seemed like the correct instrument, and included a photocopy of the inside cover.
She called me on a Tuesday. No greeting. "Which book?"
I told her.
The silence lasted long enough that I said hello twice. Then: "I sold that book the week I stopped writing. Come on Saturday. I make tea at four and I don't repeat myself."
Her flat smelled of ironing and old paper. She was seventy-one, small, precise, with the classroom voice teachers never fully sheathe. The biscuits were arranged on the plate like an argument, best ones facing out. When I put the photograph on the table between us, she did not touch it at first. Then she picked it up with both hands, the way you hold a sleeping bird, and said, "I had forgotten I was ever that girl."
I had come expecting to be the interesting one, the young stranger returning a time capsule. For twenty minutes that is what it was: she narrated her own margins, laughing at her nineteen-year-old certainties, wincing at the tally on the endpaper. Fourteen rejections, and a wedding, and a job, and a mother who needed nursing, and a century that kept moving. "I didn't decide to stop," she said. "I just kept deciding not to start... It's a different sin. Slower."
Then she went still over page forty, and the afternoon turned.
"This is not my writing."
I leaned over. Under her pencilled "Yes. Now what?", in blue ballpoint, in a hand neither hers nor mine, someone had written: "You keep going, obviously. Did you?"
Neither of us had noticed it as a conversation until that moment, but once we saw it, it was everywhere. The book had passed through at least one other life between her hands and mine, and whoever owned it in between had answered her. Not once. Throughout. Where teenage Margaret had scrawled "Nobody wants poems from a chemist's daughter," the blue pen had replied: "Wrong. Signed, a plumber's son." Beside her tally of fourteen rejections, the blue pen had written: "Fourteen is nothing. I stopped counting at sixty and got in at sixty-one."
Margaret read every reply out loud, twice, once in disbelief and once for pleasure. Somewhere across four decades, a stranger had sat with her loneliest sentences and refused to leave a single one unanswered. She laughed at the plumber's son.
Then she cried, briefly and furiously, the way people cry when sympathy arrives forty years late and turns out to still be usable.
Then she asked the practical question: "Is he alive, this blue pen?"
We never found out... There was no name, no date, no tally of his own. We tried for a while and then, by unspoken agreement, stopped. Some correspondents are meant to stay upstream of you.
Every secondhand book is a message in a bottle that already found shore once and got thrown back for somebody else.
Here is what the blue pen actually accomplished, sixty-odd years after Rilke and forty-odd after Margaret: she started again.
Not gently, either.
She had taught herself everything the first time from library books and rejection slips, alone; I showed her that nobody has to learn that way anymore, and she took to studying the craft at seventy-one with the vengeance of a woman collecting a debt. She wrote about the scooter. She wrote about her mother's last years. She wrote poems full of hope that had clearly been waiting under a tarpaulin since 1979, needing only to be uncovered, not built.
In March, she entered a monthly poetry contest, her first submission of any kind since the last line of that tally. Her envelope days were over; I sat beside her and she made me click the button twice, "in case the first one was rude." She did not win... She was shortlisted, and she printed the email and framed it and hung it where the ironing board used to lean, and if you think a shortlist cannot be a trophy, you have never waited forty-seven years for one.
"Entry fifteen," she said, updating the endpaper tally in pen, at last. "Outcome: alive."
In June we finished what the book had evidently been trying to do all along. We went through it together one last time and added our own layer, her in red ink now, me in green, answering both the pencil girl and the blue-pen man, two more voices in the margin choir. Under "Margaret D'Souza, 1974. Keep going," she wrote simply: "She did." Then we took the bus to the Sunday market and gave it back to the same row of sellers, no explanation, forty rupees changing hands in the wrong direction because the bookseller refused to take a book for free, on principle.
She kept the photograph. That was the one condition. It lives in the frame with the shortlist email, the girl on the scooter and the woman who caught up with her, seventy years and one blue pen apart.
I watched the bookseller wedge Rilke spine-out between a physics textbook and someone's abandoned diet plan, and I felt the specific happiness of releasing something wild back where you found it.
Somewhere in this city, I hope, there is a plumber's son with a blue pen. He has no idea what he finished.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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