Cigarette smoke wafting, the coffee grows tepid. This one’s taking longer to finish than usual. The coffee lays in the wake of the flicked ash while a trail of smoke envelopes it. The butler, Alfred Merryweathers, arrives at my table and asks, “Shall I get you another cup fresh from the pot, sir?” To which I reply, “The lukewarm the cup, the bitter the coffee. Complements my smoke in a manner only my palette can explain.” A book lies beside my cup.
It is a book I wrote years back. The book was born out of a dialogue I had with a peer. It had something to do with once-inhabited spaces. Inevitably about where and how we grew up. It was a building the color of cement. It wasn’t exactly sturdy. It had started flicking its crumbs barely a few years after construction. But what didn’t set this building apart from the others was its housing of stories, or rather, it in itself being a plot point in many a subplot.
One of them was a poet. The poet was a war veteran. His poetry was born out of the delirium-inducing hallucinations his brain was prone to. The poetry that flowed echoed the gradual crashing of two cars, each car being a realm of existence and the resulting collision being ink on the paper. This poet was felicitated with an award for his recent collection of poetry, a collection born out of the collected trauma of seeing his peers reduced to literal rubble.
There was another poet. This poet had been part of a “revolution” in his youth. Some business about overthrowing some government somewhere. His business was the usual. Write poetry in favor of the revolution. Nobody knew he did it merely to save up for cigarettes and contraband back then.
There was a movie star. She had been part of an acclaimed film about one of the world wars, or was it the War of the Roses or was it the Cold War? She is now a poet too. Her poetry stems from how the movie set wasn’t too divorced from a battlefield. Almost everyone was at loggerheads, food was rationed, every scene was a battle between the dichotomy of who she lived as and who she was made to become. She did this to pay for the whiskey. The movie business. The poetry flowed after the fourth glass of whiskey.
And then came my room. And no, I’m not a poet, at least not until now. I write novels. Well, something that almost resembles a novel. I am a grave robber. I steal stories from where they are inhabited. This building is where my mind goes on its nocturnal prowl. From the bits and snatches heard, I write fragments. No, I have never asked for permission. Hence I hesitate to mention names and places. Alfred is in on the secret and has given me his consent to be mentioned voluntarily.
I wouldn’t call my book a collection of stories, though. Stories have a beginning-middle-end. Could I be pretentious enough to call it snapshots of lives? Yes, life has a beginning-middle-end loop as well, but closure, more often than not, is not par for the course.
The above is an excerpt from a book I was working on for the past few years. Just like all my other projects, this book, too, went nowhere, and the manuscript probably is languishing in some nondescript folder of a computer I probably don’t even own anymore.
An eerie coincidence of this year’s Booker International longlist is that almost every title I have read so far is reminding me of some or the other of my unfinished work. Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi is no different.
What the book is about is something that is easily available to read online, hence, I didn’t feel the need to mention it here. What I instead want to say is that, in spite of being barely a few pages longer than a novella, the novel packs quite a literary punch.