Chapter 2: Guddi

## Chapter 2: Guddi

The singing was louder now.

"Aam ka achaar, nimbu ka ras,* *Kitaabein sambhalo, warna ho jayega sarvanaash!"

Mango pickle, lemon juice, take care of the books or there'll be destruction. The lyrics made no sense, but the voice, warm, slightly breathless, the voice of someone who sang not for an audience but for herself; was coming from behind a tower of books so tall that it leaned at an angle that would have given an architect cardiac arrest.

A book flew from somewhere above and landed on the pile with a THWACK that sent dust motes spiraling into a shaft of light from a high window.

"Hello?" Kabir called. "I'm down here."

"Arre!" The exclamation came from the top of a wooden ladder, a ladder so old that its rungs were worn to a shine by generations of hands, leaning against a bookshelf that reached the ceiling. At the top of the ladder was a pair of red Kolhapuri chappals. Above the chappals were two short, sturdy legs in churidar pajamas, the kind that bunched at the ankles in comfortable folds. Above the pajamas was a woman shaped like a matka, round in the middle, narrower at the top and bottom, wearing a kurta of such vivid green that it looked like she'd been dipped in the sea.

She leaned over the ladder so far that Kabir's stomach lurched with the certainty that she was about to fall.

"Who are you?" she asked. Her voice was cheerful despite the precarious angle.

"I'm Kabir," he said politely. "A customer."

"Customer?" The word seemed to confuse her, as if the concept of someone actually buying books from a bookshop was novel. She gripped the sides of the ladder with gloved hands, gardening gloves, thick, green, the kind Kabir's nani used for her rose bushes — turned her chappals sideways on the rung, and slid down the ladder like a fireman on a pole.

Kabir blinked. The woman was shorter than him, barely five feet, with a round face that had the specific warmth of a face that smiled more often than it didn't. Her hair was grey streaked with henna-red and what appeared to be actual green; the green of the money plant that was, Kabir now noticed, growing through her hair as if it had mistaken her head for a trellis. Her eyes were enormous behind round spectacles with thick brass frames, and she wore the expression of someone who was simultaneously delighted and alarmed by his presence.

"I'm Guddi," she said. She extended her rough hand for a handshake, then noticed the gardening gloves. "Oops. I wear them for sliding down. But they do make holding the books more difficult."

"I noticed." Kabir looked at the pile of dropped books on the cold floor.

"What song was that?" he asked.

Guddi turned the colour of a ripening tomato. "I make them up. When I'm nervous, I sing. It calms my nerves. My didi used to say it sounds like a crow with a throat infection, but I think that's harsh."

"My sister sings too. Bollywood songs, mostly. She knows every song from every Karan Johar film."

"Isn't music wonderful? I used to read aloud. That calms me even better. But reading aloud is strictly forbidden now."

"I saw the sign. Why is that?"

Guddi's face changed. The cheerfulness dimmed. not vanished, but covered, like a lamp with a cloth thrown over it. The light was still there, but muted.

"Wait, you're in the Prohibited Section. You're not supposed to be here!" She fluttered her rough hands; a gesture that was less alarm and more the automatic motion of someone who'd been told the rules but had a complicated relationship with them. "These books are not for sale, beta. They're..." She searched for the word. "Special."

"First editions? Manuscripts?"

"Rarer than that."

"How rare?"

"The rarest. The kind of rare that doesn't have a price because the price would be... well, it wouldn't be in rupees."

Kabir looked at the pile of books on the floor. He could read the spines: The Arabian Nights. The Panchatantra. Robinson Crusoe. A Tale of Two Cities.

"I've read all of these," he said.

Guddi's enormous eyes grew even larger behind the brass spectacles. "You have?"

"Well, not all of A Tale of Two Cities. The opening was brilliant, but the middle was like eating plain roti without dal."

"Most children don't read these books anymore," Guddi said, with the specific sadness of someone who believed this was a tragedy.

"Well, I'm... rare," Kabir said. He hadn't meant it to sound as lonely as it did. But something in the word, the admission that he was different, that he read Sherlock Holmes instead of playing cricket, that his best friend was a girl who believed in ghosts and his second-best friend was an encyclopedia of scientific terms — resonated in the calm of the Prohibited Section.

Guddi studied him. The enormous eyes behind the brass spectacles looked at him the way a jeweler looked at a stone: assessing not the surface but the substance beneath.

"So you are," she said. And smiled.

Then the smile collapsed.

"Oh, but you've come at the worst time! Tukaram is missing."

"Tukaram?"

"My didi's cat. One of twelve. Well, thirteen, actually, but Shakuntalabai doesn't count because she lives on the roof and only comes down for fish. Tukaram is the white-and-orange one. Six toes on each paw: polydactyl, very rare. And he's been..." She lowered her voice. "Sucked in."

"Sucked in where?"

"Into the book." She said this the way someone might say "into the well" or "into the fire"; with the matter-of-fact urgency of a person describing a real, physical danger.

"That's not possible," Kabir said.

"It's very possible. It happened yesterday. I was reading aloud; which I know I'm not supposed to do, but the book was so good, and Tukaram was playing with my dupatta, and there was a crab—"

"A crab?"

"From the book. A crab crawled right out of the page and across the floor. Tukaram saw it, and you know cats, beta, they cannot resist a moving thing; he chased it, and the floor turned to sand, and there was a WHOOSH and a SOUND and..." She paused. Tears appeared behind the brass spectacles, magnified to enormous, glittering drops. "He was sucked in. My poor Tukaram. All that sand between his six toes."

Kabir's scientific mind was doing its thing: the thing it always did when confronted with claims that violated the laws of physics. It was building objections, stacking them like bricks: books are paper, not portals; crabs do not emerge from pages; cats are not absorbed into stories; this woman is clearly—

"I hid the book," Guddi continued. "Right after it happened. But now I can't remember where." She twisted her warm hands, the gardening gloves making the gesture look like she was wringing out invisible washing. "It's very embarrassing. My memory is like a sieve — things go in and fall right through."

"Don't worry," Kabir said, because his instinct when confronted with distressed adults was to be helpful, even when the adult in question was claiming that a cat had been absorbed into a work of fiction. "That happens to my nani too."

"Nani! That's it!" Guddi's face lit up like a diya on Diwali. "The nani clock! I hid it in the nani clock!"

"Don't you mean grandfather clock?"

"Beta, nani clocks are much cleverer than nana clocks. Everyone knows this."

She took off with a waddle that was surprisingly fast. A woman whose short legs had spent decades navigating the maze of bookshelves and had developed their own efficient biomechanics. Kabir followed, deeper into the shop, past shelves that seemed to grow from the rough walls like coral, past a section where the books were so old that their covers had fused with the wood of the shelves, past a corner where the banyan sapling's aerial roots hung like curtains.

They arrived at a clock.

It was taller than Kabir. A wooden clock with a glass front, behind which a brass pendulum swung with the patient rhythm of something that had been counting time for centuries. The wood was carved with the same Mughal patterns as the doorframe, and the clock face had numbers in Devanagari script instead of Roman numerals.

Guddi opened the cold glass door and reached inside, past the pendulum, into the clock's dark interior. She fished around, her arm disappearing to the elbow, and pulled out a book.

It was old. Not old like the books in the school library, old like the building itself, like the carved doorframe, like the clock. The cover was leather, cracked and dark, the title embossed in gold letters that had worn to near-invisibility:

TREASURE ISLAND by Robert Louis Stevenson

"I've read this," Kabir said. "And seen the film. The old one, with the man who looks like he's permanently angry."

"Then you're very brave," Guddi said. "Because this is a dangerous book."

"I'm not brave at all. Crows scare me. But reading isn't dangerous."

Guddi looked at him. The enormous eyes behind the brass spectacles held something: not amusement, not condescension, but the distinct gravity of someone about to say something true.

"Reading is the transfer of knowledge from one mind to another," she said. "Knowledge is the most powerful thing in the universe. And anything that powerful can always be dangerous."

She opened the book. The pages were thick, yellowed, the kind of handmade paper that held its texture across centuries. The illustrations were woodcuts; black and white, sharp, the images cut into the rough paper with a precision that modern printing couldn't replicate.

She pointed to one of the illustrations. Kabir leaned in and saw a pirate, peg leg, tricorn hat, the standard equipment of literary piracy: with something on his shoulder. Not a parrot. A cat. A white-and-orange cat with paws that, even in the woodcut, were visibly oversized.

"Why has he got a cat on his shoulder instead of a parrot?" Kabir asked. "Long John Silver has a parrot called Captain Flint. Everyone knows that."

"Exactly!" Guddi exclaimed. "There is no cat in Treasure Island!"

"That's what I'm saying."

"That's what I'M saying!"

"So we're in agreement?"

"We are! We're on the same page!"

"Literally," Kabir said, looking at the page with the pirate and the cat.

"Oh, beta." Guddi's face crumpled, not with sadness but with the exact distress of confession building behind her eyes. "I was reading aloud to Tukaram. I know, I know, it's forbidden — and there was a misprint on this page. A word missing. And when I read the sentence with the missing word, it opened—"

"Opened what?"

"A kitaabi keeda hole."

"A bookworm hole?"

"Yes! Like a wormhole in physics, you know about wormholes?, except instead of connecting two points in spacetime, it connects the reader's world to the book's world. The misprint is the weak point; like a crack in a wall. When you read it aloud, the crack opens, and—"

"That violates every known law of physics."

"Many important things violate the laws of physics, beta. Love violates thermodynamics. Memory violates entropy. And books—" She held up Treasure Island. "Books violate the boundary between what is real and what is imagined."

Kabir stared at her. The scientific part of his mind was screaming objections with the intensity of a school principal who'd discovered students on the roof. But another part, the part that had read thirteen hours straight to find out how Sherlock Holmes solved a mystery, the part that stayed up past midnight reading about black holes because the universe was too interesting to sleep through, that part was calm. That part was listening.

"I don't believe you," he said.

"I know."

"It's impossible."

"I know."

"But can I see the misprint?"

Guddi turned to the page. Pointed to a line of text. Kabir leaned in and read:

"I now felt for the first time, the joy of—"

"STOP!" Guddi grabbed his arm. "If you read it aloud, you'll open the hole again!"

And what happened next was not because Kabir was disobedient. It was not because he was reckless or foolish or careless. It was because the curiosity monster inside him, the monster that had made him read thirteen hours straight, that had made him carry fourteen kilograms of books in his school bag, that had made him crawl past cactuses into the Prohibited Section — that monster was stronger than his fear, stronger than his common sense, stronger than the very reasonable voice in his head that was saying don't.

He had to know. He had to know if bookworm holes were real.

"I now felt for the first time, the joy of exploration!" Kabir read aloud.

Guddi's enormous eyes went wide.

And the cold floor turned to sand.