continues... “Pastor, can you pray for us before you depart?” the interviewer requested, but Henry wouldn’t welcome the idea of seeing the Evangelist pray. He hissed and hurriedly clicked a button on the remote control to switch off the TV. “Nonsense,” Henry whispered, and then the words of Grandwala rang on his head again. He put to mind the information brought by the younger Ted, that Harrison must have got the secret of spying at a ‘co-citizen’ from books. Henry had many such books, but he had never had as much patience as to peruse any, since none of them had a straightforward style of parlance. Henry scrambled for the books in the safest part of his shelf, which he had just unlocked with a key. He got one. “Shit!” he yelled as he discovered what the book he had just picked was. It was the Bible. Henry had brought it along on his first arrival to the campus then, when he was just having his admission, but had never glanced through it for once, if at all he remembered he had such in his possession. Picking it up furiously, Henry rushed to the bin, let the Bible down into the large, plastic thing and closed it quickly with a lid as if the book was going to fly out of it if he hadn’t shut it. “To hell with you!” he shouted at the book in a very disgustful manner as he turned heel to continue the search for the book of his desire. Grandwala’s words rang in his heart again: ““Hear this, the earth is filled with nothing...I read this from a book, Henry and that book had made me wiser. It’s the best of all books. The book said the earth was void and filled with darkness… correction, not my book. It is the book of power. Every solution to every problem is in it” With the way Henry had intensified his locomotion towards the shelf, it was conspicuous that the remembrance of the Spider’s speech had prompted him into such action, to resume the search for the book. “Oh I’ve got it!” yelled Henry in triumph eventually, having stumbled over a large voluminous book at the innermost part of the rectangular wooden board. Pulling it out, Henry read slowly, “The BOOK OF POWER” which was written on the cover page of the hardback. He licked his tongue and frolicked unconsciously, believing that he had found it at last—the Book of Power Grandwala was talking about. He opened it and read the first page as fast as he could; amazingly, Henry was able to comprehend the words on it now, at a moderate rate, unlike when he had first acquired the book. Back then Henry never was able to tell what the name of the book was, reading it as, “BO. OKOF. P. OWE. R” seven months ago when he purchased the book. Henry wondered why his intelligence and discretion had not helped him in those days to bring the letters in the words together and call it, “BOOK OF POWER”. He was however glad, now that the mystery was solved already. The book had taken up the smell of the shelf interior and dust had settled on it, defacing the book. Cobwebs had been spun round the book due to months of neglect it had faced. It seemed the constructor (spider) who made the gossamers, had done it in a very fastidious manner, since the inner part of the shelf, where the creature lived, had not been visited for so long by the shelf owner (Henry). Henry took time to get rid of the dirt on the cobwebby book. All of a sudden both the large spider and Henry were taken aback by the sudden emergence of one another (the spider hasted out of the space between the forty-fifth and forty-sixth pages) as Henry flipped erratically the pages of the book. Henry, for fear of the unexpected ‘landlord’, threw the book unto the floor. He picked it up again later, after the spider had evacuated, and began to pick the cobwebs with his bare hands. Having tidied up the long-abandoned book, Henry osculated the hardbound cover of the book, held it tightly to his chest and said, “I’ll never let go of you, ’cos you’re so dear to me.” Henry’s comment on the book could be justified with the fact that the book cost had him a fortune. The amount he bought the book was so high that it could have bought all the books Henry had and some changes would have been left. He gazed into it and began to go through it avidly.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 17:04:48 +0000
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