The book cost twelve rupees, water-stained, its spine soft as a wrist. I buy like this on College Street, whatever the monsoon has half-ruined, because ruined books are cheap and I am a cheap man. This one had pencil in the margins. A previous reader arguing with the author, and I liked him at once; he underlined the lines I would have underlined.
By page forty the notes had stopped being about the book. He reads on the tram home, standing, holding the rail with two fingers. I read on the tram home. Standing. Two fingers. He will call this coincidence until page sixty, and then he will not sleep.
I did not sleep. At dawn I went back to the stall. The bookseller, unlocking his shutters, remembered the sale, but backwards. He had not sold me the book. He had bought it, the previous evening, from a thin man in a grey kurta who said: give it to whoever has been reading over my shoulder.
I wear a grey kurta. I did not sell him a book. I own no book to sell.
I have read to the last page now. The final note is fresh, the graphite still bright, in a hand I have stopped pretending is not my own. It says: he still believes there are two of us. There is a smell of pencil shavings in the room. The pencil in my fingers is warm. I do not remember picking it up.
I am writing this down so that when you find the book you will understand. You, reading over my shoulder. You have such familiar handwriting.