What would I not give to get the boredom out of me? The pressure is too much and I’m afraid it will draw a cracking line down my skull, ripping the scalp away through its fault-lines and leaking blood over the black backrest of the chair. I shouldn’t have drank the coffee, I think. It was probably wiser to wait for the watch to display 16:00 and walk down the stairs, down the corridor, and up the stairs and into the canteen. On the way I would see many people walking my way or into mine, men and boys and women and girls. Water would have been better, though it would mean walking out of the reading room and stepping out into the white-lined corridor and returning soon, all of which terrifies me. The kind of people you would have to look at when you got back. Oh! There is water in the bottle. I am surprised and relieved. The sort of things people bring into the world. Laptops that are wedge-shaped and bottles that could have been Eiffel towers if the designer had ten more minutes. Maybe it is the air-conditioning that is calming me down, or maybe it is my brain winding down as I try to find enough letters, but the room suddenly feels warm. Warm in the way a basketball court is in the evening—not in the way you feel uncomfortably warm cuddling with a woman in heat. Maybe I should just gulp down a liter of water. The water cooler is clad in plastic wrap with the words ‘JSW Steel’ and it says on the label that the wrap should be removed once the cooler is installed. The people we are, the plastic wrap is still there; but I do have a case on my computer, so go figure.
Yesterday Minha was walking on the city streets when she saw a yellow crane with a red warning light turn to the right side of the building in front of her and vanish. The crane vanishing from the street made her think of two things. One was a Tomas Transtromer poem she read sitting on the scratched-up toilet seat in the afternoon, and the second was a scene she had watched from a SpiderMan movie involving spiderman swinging through the American city with his webs shooting out onto the cranes lining the road, quite like the yellow crane that had vanished. Minha was reminded of the Trantromer poem (she always thought that the name could have been Transformer and still retained the elegance——Tomas Transformer)———and decided that once she was back in her room she would look up the name of the poem and write something about it. By the time she had dodged the bottle-and-bag yielding line of techbros and women wearing smooth and shiny formal trousers, she had forgotten everything about the cranes, Transtromer, and SpiderMan. Now that they were out of the picture, which Minha hadn’t realised, she was able to look at the taxi driver standing by the bottom of the footbridge and staring at her chest. This was not unusual and she had grown resistant to the feeling it evoked in her, but his betel-stained mouth and smugness made her suffocate for a moment before she could dodge the motorbike and car inching forward and enter her apartment building.
There were a few people getting out of the lift and a couple talking, with the guy perched on top of his bike and she with her hand on the backseat and looking serious and speaking in lowered voices. The lift remained open for a while and it seemed to Minha that it would stay that way for a while, but by the time she had reached the door leading into the lift lobby the lift had began to slide shut. She lunged forward and jammed her thumb into the button which glowed red for a moment and the doors slid back out into the grooves. She stepped in, sqeezing her right thumb in her left palm to dull the pain. She was getting out of her running clothes when the phone rang. Minha had a moment of trepidation when the buzz went off, but calmed down when she figured it was about seven o’ clock and it must be Srajan. She panicked when the shirt was out of her face and saw that it was a number she didnt recognize and then she remembered that the umbrella she ordered online was supposed to arrive today. She put the shirt back on and answered the call.