The Bookseller
Gopal Balachandran
The bookstore, located on the second floor of the converted warehouse on Pleasant Street, never truly seemed open. More often than not, during the brief hours listed on the placard, the door on the first floor would be locked. And even when the bookstore was open, bearing little, if any relation to the published times, the weak light emanating from a room on the second floor was the only indication of activity behind its closed doors. Unlike its neighbor next door, a Thai restaurant called The Spicy Lime, the bookstore never gave off any sign of commerce.
Still though, it seemed promising to Ravi. He had passed by it numerous times on his way to and from work and caught glimpses of it through the second floor bay window. This revealed a thin yellowed fern on the windowsill and books on shelves rising almost to the level of the ceiling. It was the type of place that maybe in a bigger, better known urban area, would be treasured by its residents, would add color and character to the neighborhood, would find its way into guidebooks and quite possibly, carry a very good and varied collection of books. He reminded himself almost daily that he needed to visit New Bedford's only downtown bookstore.
Then one night in the fall, the changing weather, the one less hour of day light, hanging as heavily on his mood, as the wind gusts from the bay, he found the bookstore open. With nothing but the four corners of his apartment awaiting him, he took the detour. He pushed open the flimsy street side door. A narrow staircase led up to a little landing and another door, built with the same flimsy construction as the outer one, opened into the small cramped space. He noticed almost immediately the paperback version of Culler's Structuralist Poetics, placed prominently in the bookshelf facing the door. In the adjacent shelves, there were stacks and copies of various classic works, Thomas Mann, Herman Melville (no surprise there since it seemed the only draw in New Bedford), Henry James, Joseph Conrad. In short, classic works.
His entrance seemed to startle the man who sat behind the register near the window. He was tall, very skinny and had large bulging eyes, magnified by the thick plastic frames of his glasses. "Oh, so you're not a salesperson?" Ravi shook his head. After a short pause, almost compulsively, the man started speaking. He apologized profusely and repeatedly for the lack of fiction selection, for the fact that the books were not ordered alphabetically, that business was terrible, that he was in fact a terrible businessman, who was barely able to make ends meet. "I try not to compromise on the books I buy, but in a place like New Bedford, high literature is not exactly a money maker. I sometimes do buy romance and other type novels. I should buy more and go online but I just haven't done it. I'm really not much of a businessmen and don't really have much of a business sense."
Ravi stood listening patiently to the man's words while edging closer to the two large shelves where all the fiction was kept. It was only when the man stopped for a moment to let him pass, apologizing once more for talking so much and not allowing him to browse that the opportunity finally presented itself.
He had not lied, thought Ravi, the fiction holdings were fairly meager and placed in non-alphabetical order. If he wanted Fitzgerald, as he did at that moment, then he would have to look through the books, title by title. The only recognizable pattern was in the make of the book, Penguin classics with Penguin classics, the Modern Libraries with the Modern Libraries, the Nortons with the Nortons. But, though the collection was small, Ravi was still impressed and without looking up, told the bookstore owner exactly that. The bookseller seemed pleased beyond words and responded, "You're one of the few here in New Bedford." Then, as if some inner need were quenched, he crept back to his little seat in front of the window, a steaming cup of tea held between his long bony fingers. He wore a quiet, contented look for the duration and took no notice of Ravi or his wanderings.
A strange man, thought Ravi, but New Bedford was full of them. Ravi had only to look at the characters on Sixth Street--the man in the trench coat walking up and down Sixth from the halfway house with a walker, the women with mournful sagging faces congregating every night outside the YWCA and the strange mysterious parties that seemed to occur every night outside the Elk Lodge--to rethink his opinion that the bookstore owner, a man by the name of Lennie Glazer, was in fact so strange. Indeed, if there was anyone strange, if there anyone out of place in the down and out whaling town, it was him, the Indian boy from the city who relocated to work at the Public Defender's a mere three months ago. "You moved here from Boston? You chose to come here?" the woman at the gym asked incredulously. To which he could only smile sadly. Yes, he had chosen to come here. Yes, he had chosen to make a new, strangely hopeful, start in damp, drizzly New Bedford. He had left because he was in search of something. What it was he could not say but it was something deeper than the simple career shift the move outwardly signified. He wanted to explore this unanswered question, plumb its uneven depths, examine its underbelly. At the same time, he believed, like the seafaring predecessors who embarked but did not remain, that there was a half-life to his interest, that it was only a matter of time before the depths he wished to examine were plotted out, catalogued, elucidated, before he would finally heed the siren call of other, more glamorous places.
And yet, thought Ravi, at least for the time being, there was definitely something to this town. His studio was cozy if not particularly spacious and he could not argue with the location. A short walk up the hill deposited him among large historic mansions and parks and a short walk north took him to cobblestone streets and the historic district. And from all outward appearances, the neighborhood was as safe as they came in New Bedford. He remembered, none too fondly, the apartments he visited just north of the interstate in the North End. Historic, quaint, the papers described the neighborhood, but when he visited all he saw was a depressed, poor, huddled set of three family homes with plastic bags and garbage for yard decoration. When the landlord tried to assure you of the safety of the locale, Ravi thought, that was sign enough that it wasn't the place to be. Then the studio on 6th opened up. Perfect, if a bit small. And he hadn't even felt as claustrophobic as he had expected when he first viewed the apartment.
Ravi found something for B., a book set in medieval Islam in the cities of Granada, Fez and Cairo, and almost half out of pity for the middle-aged bachelor existence of Lennie, bought it. She would like it, he thought. Lennie couldn't have been more contented; he smiled, placed the book inside of a paper bag and said, happily, "Hope to see you back soon."
He could have very easily shown up in court as a defendant, Ravi thought on his way back to the apartment. Could easily see him busted on charges of heroin or cocaine possession. It certainly would not have been unprecedented. In his short three months, he had already gotten a sense that there were a limited number of characters in the town. New Bedford, Ben Lamont often said, is actually only composed of five thousand people, regardless of what the censuses say.
It had been almost a decade since Ravi had lived in such a small town; the intervening years had taken him to bigger, more cosmopolitan centers, on the east and west coasts. New Bedford was the first place he had come across, that was not a destination, that was not a beacon, but rather a place one left as soon as possible. Blocks of connected three family homes had fallen into disrepair and become dens of drug dealing, violence and poverty. Even before he read the police reports, he could almost guess, just by looking at the charges, the neighborhoods they occurred in. The drugs and drunken disorderlies in the North End, the murders on Ruth street, the prostitutes and gangs around Monty's playground.
He thought back to the move itself, the stress of negotiating the truck through the narrow streets of Somerville and onto the highway, the traffic all up and down 93, the on and off ramps to 140, and even within New Bedford itself, finding a parking place close enough to his apartment. It was far more draining than he had thought it would be. And that was only the half of it. They still had to drive some four hundred more miles south to Baltimore to drop B. off. And then, he was suddenly alone, after a relationship of almost two years and constant companionship. They had intentionally left things vague, the details to be plotted and worked out later, the door both half open and half closed. Lucky he had saved a part of the dime bag Jay had given him. Lucky there was still a book of matches left by the previous tenant. Lucky there was enough to lull him to sleep that first long unpleasant night in New Bedford. The sounds of cars from 6th were much louder than he had expected.
This will be my time, he told himself, my time to withdraw into myself. He had always had a dream of a certain type of monastic lifestyle, a life defined by discipline and ritual. His hours reduced to exercise, books and meditation, he would then be free to observe without thought of result or reciprocation.
But every fortress has its gate, every mountain range its pass and so it was that B. gained entry, ravaging his idea of order, and effectively eroding his Pursuit. Time had not healed his wounds, had not cured the pain of separation. No amount of reading or meditating or exercise could lighten it; no amount of Rossi wine, drunk religiously every night from large, sturdy jugs, could deaden it. He did not belong in the town; he had spent more years in school, more time--too much time--poring over books, both required and for pleasure, than it seemed anyone else in the city. Until that was, he met Lennie Glazer.
He began to visit the bookstore regularly. Some days, he hardly said a word at all to Lennie and on others, did nothing but talk. This depended entirely on Lennie, whose moods were as changeable as the weather. At times he could be very friendly, explaining to Ravi how he loved the desolation of the holiday seasons, the emptiness of the streets, the businesses all closed and how spending them alone did not bring him down but in fact energized him. "I've never been one to follow cultural norms," he said. But don't you go to the synagogue? Ravi thought. Apparently it was an exception. At other times, he could be cold, unfriendly. When Ravi asked him one day what he thought of Magic Mountain, Lennie snapped back and said, "To be honest, I don't really do fiction. My interests lie much more in intellectual and cultural history. So, no I have not read Magic Mountain and know nothing about it, except that it's by Thomas Mann and set in a sanitorium and is very thick."
He crawled back into his little spot by the window, mumbling something unintelligible under his breath. The eight cylinder growl of the speeding New Bedford police department cruiser jarred the plants hanging on the window sill and the wood frames of the windows. "Never fails to give me the creeps," he muttered under his breath. "Sirens all the time or else it's the sea gulls. Always one or the other." Ravi quietly browsed, offended, and yet, at the same time, trying to keep from laughing. There was a pointlessness, an ineffectual quality to his anger, as if he were an animal thrashing about within the bars of an impenetrable prison.
As Ravi turned to leave, Lennie stopped him. "You see," he started quietly, once the night had died down again, "I came upon fiction late in life. I started to read a book by Amos Oz, an Israeli writer. Not that that was the reason I started reading the book, though I am Jewish. He was a historical writer and it opened up a door inside my brain I didn't even know existed until that moment. Then, for a while, that was all I read. I was going through a difficult time. 29, I had just gotten divorced--wasn't my choice--and it was fiction that got me through it." He said it all quietly, in a single breath, his fingers wrapped around the cup of tea and his eyes staring off at a point far away, towards the route the police car had taken. "Now," he said grandly with a sudden sweep of his hand and turn of his head, "it only brings back bad memories, of times and places I'd rather forget. I am a masochist, so I haven't completely shut off that world. I do read a novel now and then occasionally. But if I start it's like a drug, I can't stop. It reminds me of the bigger, wider world that I've always wanted to see but have never been able to. And that brings home exactly where I am now. A prison. Believe me, I've always wanted to leave New Bedford, and though I've tried, planned and dreamed, have never been able to. My only escape is through the door in here." He pointed to his temple, significantly. "Most people don't realize that you really can live your whole life inside the four corners of your mind." He considered. "Unless of course you're crazy. In which case you're liable to kill yourself." And he started laughing, a high pitched whinnying sound, that was as jarring for its tone as its unexpectedness.
"But why couldn't you leave, Lennie?" Ravi asked.
He snorted disgustedly. "Too tough, too complex and too much to explain." But he did try, mumbling through a laundry list of family and personal ties, his mother, the bookstore, the odd jobs he did to put food on the table and keep up with car payments, the obligation to attend the conservative synagogue just on the far side of Buttonwood Park to maintain its quorum--ironic because Lennie found all types of organized religion stupid--the ocean and bay that he loved, his deep dislike of change of any kind.
A long, vague and generally uninteresting list. Ravi was only half listening when Lennie spoke. No explanation was really necessary; Ravi, being rootless, understood all the advantages to being from someplace, to belonging somewhere. Easy to resent the bars of a prison when the cell was all you knew, tough to actually open the door to freedom.
But stranger than Lennie in the bookstore was Lennie outside of it. On a clear cold November day, Ravi caught sight of Lennie's long lean figure ducking into an alleyway off of Purchase, his head down and gesturing, as if he was in the midst of some unknown, unheard debate. He had nothing on but a T-shirt and even in the distance, Ravi could see his bony arms blue with cold and blue with the swollen veins hard-pressed to keep the circulation in his elongated frame intact.
He considered for a moment, whether he should stop and say something to him. The temperature was below freezing and it was only a matter of time before the chills would set in. But at that instant, a woman whose nurse's garb was visible just underneath her winter jacket, ran across the street from the Community Health Clinic and immediately took Lennie's arm. Gradually, Lennie calmed down and allowed himself to be led away down the street to the clinic. Through the gaps in the parked cars, Ravi saw something he hadn't noticed before. Lennie's bare feet, his big toe impossibly large, shuffling across the cold pavement.
But the image of Lennie being led to his own private sanatorium did not linger long in Ravi's mind. His clients had similar problems and more pressing immediate concerns. Work consumed him. The cases he had arraigned were slowly blooming, leading to pretrial conferences, motions to dismiss and motions to suppress. With it came longer hours, more research and more involved, concentrated work. One night, after an exhausting day in court, he remained in the office to prepare for a suppression hearing. A difficult, yet interesting case, one where the Commonwealth had given little ground, little discovery and where the only offer at the pretrial was two years in jail. Cocaine distribution was the charge and it had supposedly occurred 1000 feet from a school, carrying a two year mandatory minimum. The client was trolling the streets of New Bedford with one Randall Gorelick. They had found all the drugs on Gorelick but charged the client as well. Guilt by association, that was the real charge.
The name Gorelick sounded familiar to Ravi. He thought he had overheard the name spoken by one of the attorneys in the office. The clients, their codefendants and the victims all occupied a merry-go-round where they often exchanged places. In more than one instance, the office had inadvertently been assigned to defend a client who had been a victim in a previous case. He decided to check Gorelick's name in the file cabinet containing an index of every client the office had represented; while flipping through, he happened upon an unremarkable three by five card with two simple words printed on it. Leonard Glazer. An insistent pounding on the door suddenly startled him. He was alone, wasn't he? He scanned the office quickly, but no one was on the landing or the foyer. He finally relaxed when he saw the outline of the sea gulls through the skylight on the ceiling and heard their squawking. A dry, piercing sound. They were snapping their bills and webbed feet against the roof again. He turned his attention back to the index card, considering. The card was only the key and contained no intrinsic value in and of itself. He needed to see what was behind the door the card opened. He placed it back into the file and skipped down a flight of stairs to the Vault, the enclosed, cellar like room that contained thousands of old files of all the cases the office had ever handled. He pulled Lennie's file, reading the police report for his Superior Court case, glancing through his criminal record and most importantly, comparing the booking photo with his own recollection. An undoubted match.
His initial instinct turned out to be correct all along. Lennie, when he wasn't serving time in the house or Cedar Junction, had been on probation for much of the last three decades. At 29, his criminal career began. Multiple charges of shoplifting, breaking and entering, possession, possession with intent to distribute, assault and battery, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. But the queen of all the charges, towering above the others, like a mountain peak over smaller hills, was his 17 charge Superior Court indictment for, among others, armed robbery, armed assault to murder and multiple firearm charges.
Lennie's Superior Court case had made the front page of the Standard Times. The yellowed pages of the old paper did nothing to dull the intensity and hopelessness of Lennie's eyes. An insatiable drug addiction had led him to the one spot where drugs of all kinds could be obtained: Saint Luke's Hospital. Entering through the double doors of the hospital with a shotgun and pillow case, he had rifled room by room, terrifying doctor and patient alike, and filled his Santa-sack full of whatever drugs he could lay his hands on. Lennie was indiscriminate in his theft, believing even relatively ordinary drugs like antibiotics had their corresponding street value. It never occurred to him that the police may have been alerted, that the relative ease with which he was able to pass was simply a foreboding of something more sinister. He walked headlong into the trap. As he left the hospital, the police ambushed him, sending a bullet aimed straight for his head. Miraculously, Lennie survived and with little in the way of any lasting damage. But by the time he recovered, the Commonwealth had already presented the case to the grand jury. Eighteen months from the time of indictment to trial, a period Lennie spent locked up at the Dartmouth House of Correction. An appropriate time to discover a love of fiction. "Never saw an inmate so calm, so collected," Ben Lamont, the director of the office and Lennie's trial lawyer, told Ravi the next day. "Though he wouldn't say it, prison really did good things for him." Ben got wistful, as he often did whenever he told war stories and Ravi braced himself for what he was certain would be a long monologue. "And to this day, I've never met a smarter client. A lot of times, we would spend our meetings doing nothing but talking about books. Within six months, he had exhausted everything the prison library could offer. I started to bring him books, classics, the kind of books you sometimes spend a semester reading and thinking about in college. He wanted to read Ulysses, so I brought him that. Then, he wanted criticism on Ulysses so he could understand the book better and I was able to get that as well." Ben sighed. "Really is too bad. He did have a lot of potential. Now he runs that bookstore on Pleasant, barely making enough to survive." Ben, for a moment was lost in his reverie, reliving the long drawn out battle, the collect telephone calls accepted, the waiting in the anteroom at Dartmouth, the openings, the closings, the deliberations. "Definitely one of the saddest cases I had," he continued finally, "never met a man who seemed more defeated, more unhappy than Lennie. You should have seen the psychological records. Even his doctors seemed surprised that he hadn't yet succeeded in committing suicide. I used to see him from time to time in the District Court, arraigned on some charge or the other, and I thought to myself, 'He's doing life on the installment plan.' Then, he surprised us all. He brought himself around, somehow worked his way into owning a bookstore and now has been out of trouble for the past seven years. No drugs, no A & Bs, no larcenies, nothing. Cops hardly look at him on their patrols."
"So he started a life of crime and then abruptly stopped. How did that happen? What's the reason for that?"
Ben shook his head. "Don't know. People come in all shapes and sizes. Some of our clients have stayed out of trouble until they're 40 and then they rack up all kinds of charges. Others started out as delinquents and then remained consistent throughout their adult lives. These usually end up dead. And then there's Lennie. His career lasted a decade and a half. Did time for another decade and then stopped. Started all of a sudden and ended just as suddenly." Ben didn't provide any more of a response. It struck Ravi again how strange it was that for a lawyer as gifted as Ben was , he didn't delve too closely into reasons or causes. Perhaps it was professional distance or simply a lack of curiosity over years of hearing one type of explanation or the other. He had likely heard it all. Or maybe, Ravi thought, there was only so much explaining that could be done in a world that defied logic and rationality.
A few nights later, after the initial run of hearings and conferences had died down somewhat, Ravi left the office exactly at five. It was already growing dark by then, a depressing reminder of the changing season. The Indian summer had lasted longer than anyone expected but was finally, in mid November, giving way. A front had pushed through during the day and turned the night clear and cold. Through the buildings on Union, he caught the sliver of the moon, pale, radiant, distant, a wisp of cloud hanging from one of its sharp edges. As he crossed over to Pleasant, Ravi looked up to the bookstore and caught Lennie looking down at him from his perch. Reluctantly, as a matter of courtesy, as if he wished to prove something to himself, he walked up the stairs to the store. He hesitated slightly at the door, his professional distance not fully matured. Difficult to completely banish the image of Lennie brandishing a rifle and sack, trolling the corridors of Saint Luke. Difficult to square the length of his criminal record with his bookish way and faraway look. Difficult to keep the world of the court and the profession from invading what little there was of his personal life.
The wind picked up and he saw the thin door at the top of the stairs shake on its hinges, rattling ever so slightly. Lennie was up there, waiting patiently for what was likely the only customer of the night. Each moment of hesitation carried out its message like a loudspeaker. How many hours had Lennie sat in his little chair? He must have mastered the ability to gauge, almost unconsciously, the amount of time it took an average person to climb up. Even at this moment, his ears must be perked at the oddity and he would look directly at Ravi curiously, searchingly.
But when Ravi opened the door, Lennie was rooted to his chair, his eyes hardly lifting up from the page he was reading. Only when the door closed behind Ravi did he look up from the book and say, "Oh Ravi, it's you. Hi." And then his eyes went back down to the opened paperback. He didn't say anything else.
Ravi, meanwhile, walked quickly past him to the fiction shelves, a full three feet away. But he hardly read the titles. His palms sweated, his fingers fidgeted. And his eyes rotated over the names on the spines, unable to register their significance or generate any interest. Every now and again, he glanced over quickly at Lennie. He was in the same prayerful position, even with the noise of sirens and gulls, coming in through the window.
But Ravi couldn't shake the feeling that as soon as he looked away, Lennie was watching him, gauging his unease, guessing the source of it. What would Lennie do if the situation were allowed to unfold the way it was going? Need to disarm him, Ravi thought, win him over. So Ravi began to ask him questions in a friendly, joking manner, a teeth full of smiles.
Lennie, however, was resistant, barely even moving his head to acknowledge the comments or the friendliness. Then Ravi stumbled onto the right topic, the book Lennie was hunched over. "What are you reading, Lennie?" he asked.
"Ever read this?" he replied, completely ignoring the question Ravi had first posed.
Ravi looked curiously at the orange cover of the book, the writer's name sounding vaguely Anglicised though it was originally written in German. "I've lost track of the number of times I've read it," Lennie continued. "Probably one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. I must now be in my hundreds."
He paused, while Ravi looked at him questioningly. "I mean in the number of times I've read this book. I must've read it at least a hundred times." Then, suddenly, as if he had just come upon a profound resolution, "You know, you should read it. Why don't you borrow it over the weekend? Let me know what you think. I know you'll return it."
It wasn't clear to Ravi, at least not immediately, why Lennie chose to lend him the book. The weekend was Thanksgiving and all over that long depressing holiday, he read the four stories cover to cover, each character the very epitome of loneliness itself. And each, at the conclusion, ending their lives by different means, death the ultimate release to suffering.
Doubly difficult to read considering the circumstances. He had broken it off with B. on Wednesday night--a more formal end to an end that had already begun months before. They had met at the airport at the beginning of the Thanksgiving holiday, their conversation brief and emotional, while waiting for her luggage at baggage claim. She had argued but it was tempered, resigned, more out of habit than any real wish to prolong the relationship. A circumstance Ravi found more galling than he cared to admit.
The break up was over important considerations--all involving his family--that may have provided the pot-boiler drama of a Hindi cinema in a different, more extreme context. There wasn't disapproval, not exactly, but two different languages spoken, even when the words themselves sounded the same. Two sets of expectations of what life had to offer. Two sets of responsibilities and duties. The heavy shadow of responsibility upon him at all times, whether he realized it or not. And the irony of ironies. He found himself much of the weekend, realizing how little he had in common with anyone in the family gathering, with nothing much to say, nothing at all to talk about, dragged unwittingly to the malls on Black Friday. How difficult it was to see a mother whose mind seemed to be breaking down further and further as the days passed, hidden only thinly by a veil of ritual and religious piety. How difficult it was to see a brother who could only reveal himself in flashes and only when the sister in law was not around. How difficult it was to see a nephew in the middle of it all. Better off to be alone in New Bedford, Ravi thought, with books and sports, to confront the long winter alone.
So it was with a certain amount of relief that he returned to work Monday morning, ready to absorb himself once again in the numerous tasks that occupied him and made each day feel like a track meet. And when the day inevitably ended, with a wallpaper of tasks, both real and imagined, having covered every inch of it, he breathed a sigh of relief. Another day as featureless and cold as a metal ball bearing. But at least, he thought, there was nothing approximating the pain of Thanksgiving. He wondered why it was that among the enlightened and civilized, the ending of physical pain--euthanasia--was greeted as humane and merciful, while the same response to sufferings emotional, intellectual and spiritual was treated as cowardly, unhealthy, a malady that needed to be cured.
The bookstore and the bookseller gradually receded into memory; on his walks home from work, he hardly noticed the bookstore itself, let alone whether or not it was open or closed. It became another door, among many, another feature of the landscape that called no attention to itself. Most days, all he ever saw was the shuffling of his feet over the pavement, carrying him slowly back to the four barren walls of his studio. On some days, even that level of concentration eluded him. He found himself back at his apartment with no memory of what had transpired in the interval.
Weeks passed and gradually the veil lifted. In the gray and brown winter, he felt, paradoxically, as if the color had returned. He was able to see New Bedford once more, from the steeple of the tower-like church on County to the friezes of the art deco buildings on Union. New Bedford had resurrected, become a living city once again, rather than simply a den for phantasmagoric visions of B. He smiled, thinking that in spite of the abortive Pursuit, he managed to stay afloat. Perhaps the rishis were right all along, he thought, there was something in each of us that was transcendent.
It was on one of those hopeful evenings that he finally noticed the locked doors of the bookstore. When was the last time it was open?, he thought startled. The full flood of memories, kept locked within a trunk he didn't even know existed, came rushing back. The bookstore hadn't been open. It hadn't been open for weeks.
The plan, so simple and so obvious, suddenly dawned on him. Clouds lift on a mountain road, revealing the deep ravine below. The refrain kept running through his head, as he left work in a panic that evening.
He stopped in front of the bookstore on his way back. It was still closed and the door still locked. No light shone on either the hallway or the landing. Ravi tried to read, from the angle of the closed door and from the tread on the first steps, possible clues to Lennie's whereabouts. But there was no breakthrough. He walked next door and asked the proprietor of the Spicy Lime whether she had seen him. She nodded her head, no. Sadly, he walked back home, fearing the worst.
It came as no shock then, when he found the next morning a cut out picture of Lennie Glazer from the Standard Times obituary section. It rested neatly on his keyboard in between rows of letters.
"What he had set out to do several times in his past finally met with success," Ben Lamont had scribbled in the margin.
Ravi looked over the edge of the upright note as if from a precipice, then slowly backed away, having seen to his fill what the other side offered. He sank back into his chair, tranquil all of a sudden, a half smile folding over his lips.
Author's Note
Gopal Balachandran lives and works in Springfield, Massachusetts, the first Springfield in the United States and the largest. He spends his days defending poor people accused of committing crimes, and his nights and weekends reading and writing. He counts himself lucky because he actually likes--and draws inspiration from--his day job. His stories have appeared in various journals, both online and in print, and he is currently at work on a massive revision of a novel. The novel, told from the viewpoint of a questionably reliable narrator, is based loosely on the politics and history of the Chiapas region of Mexico. He can be reached via email at: gopal.balachandran@gmail.com.
