“We were happy because we could not go anywhere else,” mused the nostalgic narrator of Nirmal Verma’s 1972 novel, Days Of Longing . The sam...
“We were happy because we could not go anywhere else,” mused the nostalgic narrator of Nirmal Verma’s 1972 novel, Days Of Longing. The same sentiment may have been felt by another young man who, on a quiet afternoon decades later, made his way to Syndicate Book House in the small North Indian town of Bareilly.
He had played in the bookstore as a child, just before he and his family moved to another city, and with the passage of time and other distractions, Bareilly had become a vague memory. But what this young adult remembered clearly was the small debt he owed to Syndicate’s cheerful owner – even though she, most likely, would not remember him at all.
Sure enough, Santosh Verma could not quite place the nervous young man who smiled and approached her as she stood at her usual spot at the cash counter. But she was amused and then deeply touched when he explained. Handing over a bundle of notes – exactly Rs 150 – the stranger insisted Verma accept it as payment for a comic book he’d mischievously “stolen” from the store years ago as a little boy, an act that had weighed on his conscience ever since.
Santosh Verma was taken...
