We Stopped Being Friends Over a Borrowed Book
It wasn't about the book, and it was completely about the book.
Nisha borrowed my copy of The God of Small Things in June 2013, and I want to be honest about what happened next: nothing... Nothing happened for eleven years, and then everything happened in four text messages.
You should know what kind of book this was. Secondhand, forty rupees from the Sunday pavement market at Daryaganj, bought the week I turned nineteen. I had underlined it so violently that some pages looked attacked. There was a coffee ring on page 212, exactly circling the word 'later,' which I always thought the universe did on purpose. It smelled like the two monsoons it had survived on my windowsill.
And you should know what kind of friend Nisha was. Twelve years. Same school bench, same hostel corridor, same terrible phase where we both thought fringes would fix our lives. In 2011 she took a six hour night bus from Jaipur because I 'sounded wrong on the phone.' I had not even said anything was wrong. She just heard it under the words. That kind of friend.
So when she pulled the book off my shelf one evening and said, 'I'm taking this,' it was not a question, and it did not need to be. That is what we were. Her things were my things. My things were, apparently, going to Pune.
Because she moved. Eight months later, new job, big carton boxes, and I stood in her emptying flat with a roll of packing tape and personally sealed my own book into a box labelled MISC 2. I watched it happen. I said nothing, because saying something felt small, and we were not small people. We were twelve years deep.
I asked for it back exactly once that year, on the phone, light as air. 'Bring my Roy back when you visit.' She said, 'Haan, next time.' Next time became a season... Then a genre.
Two years passed. Then one night I was doing the sad late scroll through Instagram and there it was: her new flat, her new bookshelf, golden lamp light, a reel about Sunday mornings. And on the third shelf, spine out, between two strangers with intact spines, my ruined, underlined, coffee ringed book.
Living its best life... In someone else's Sunday.
Something hot and extremely stupid rose in my chest.
I screenshotted the photo, drew a red circle around the spine, and sent it to her with the caption 'hostage situation lol.' The 'lol' was doing more lifting than any three letters should be asked to do.
She replied forty minutes later: 'seriously? it's been 3 years. buy another copy, it's 300 rupees.'
It was that lowercase 'seriously' that did it. I typed things. She typed things. And within four messages we were not talking about the book at all, because of course we were not. We were talking about how she missed my father's prayer meeting for a work offsite and sent flowers instead of herself. We were talking about how I skipped her engagement for a deadline I could have moved. We had been keeping ledgers for years and calling it love.
The book was just the first entry either of us read out loud.
Twelve years, and the last word between us was 'fine.'
The silence that followed was industrial grade. Mutual friends learned to route conversations around her name the way traffic routes around a fallen tree. At parties I told the story as comedy. 'We broke up over a paperback,' I would say, and people would laugh, and I would laugh... and then I would go home and not laugh.
Here is the part I did not see coming.
Last March I was packing to move flats, pulling books off the top shelf in dusty handfuls, when a slim one slid out from behind the others and landed face open on the floor. Norwegian Wood. On the flyleaf, in fat blue handwriting I would know anywhere: 'Nisha Kulkarni, Pune. If lost, return for reward: one hug.'
Borrowed, if my math was right... in 2011.
I had been holding her book for fourteen years.
Through the fight, through the silence, through three separate rants about people who do not return books, her book sat behind mine like a witness who never got called. I sat down on the floor of my half packed flat and laughed until it turned into the other thing.
A borrowed book is a small hostage. As long as it sits on someone else's shelf, the friendship is technically not over.
I did what I always do with the things I cannot say to a person's face: I wrote it. For years I had written around that fight, jokes at parties, one bitter poem about 'people who take.' That week I finally wrote about the memory itself, the taping of the carton, the lowercase seriously, the fourteen years of Murakami hiding behind Roy. I posted the poem on a community wall for poets, mostly to get it out of my body, and a stranger from Kerala left a comment that rearranged me: 'Post the book, not the poem.'
So I did. I wrapped Norwegian Wood in brown paper and mailed it to her mother's address in Pune, the only address I still had. No letter. Just a note tucked inside at page 87, which was still folded down where she had left it: 'Reward not claimed. No rush.'
Three weeks later a parcel arrived at my new flat, which meant her mother had asked around for my address, which meant phone calls had happened in the background of my life without me knowing. Inside was The God of Small Things. Coffee ring intact. My teenage underlining intact. One corner more bruised than I remembered, but then, same.
Her note was four lines in fat blue ink. 'It was never about the book. Also it was completely about the book. I read your poem. Chai in December when I'm in Delhi?'
I have read those four lines maybe thirty times. I keep noticing she did not say sorry and I keep noticing that I do not need her to, which is its own strange information. Somewhere in eleven years I had stopped waiting to win and started working on the forgiving, quietly, the way you pay off a loan you are embarrassed about.
The Roy is back on my shelf now, third from the left, where it always lived. Next to it there is a gap, exactly one paperback wide, where Norwegian Wood sat for fourteen years. I could slide the other books over and close it up in two seconds.
I am leaving the gap.
December is not that far.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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