Every time I entered her cabin to serve coffee, I would steal a glance at the yellow-blue book peeking out from between a carelessly stacked pile of books on her shelf. It was the same book that caught my fancy three months ago. Please don’t ask me “Why?” I have no answer. Every time I felt like asking her to lend me that book, I was interrupted by her request to serve her one more coffee. Her request was genuine. The small paper cups given to us to serve beverages could hold very little amount of the sugary, milky brown substance, not even enough to quench the thirst of a baby, let alone adults. And these are ‘thinking adults’ from a newsroom who help form public opinion. Thus the portion should be large and the management of the company running the newspaper house could be a bit more generous about serving handsome amount of coffee in slightly bigger vessels like the one my granny drinks from in my village home. But, who the hell was I to question the decision of my employers. I just used to serve coffee. Everybody knew me as the coffee guy. Yes, I was the coffee guy, I liked being addressed as that only as it helped me earn my livelihood. I always felt any other name would have killed my professional identity, even my real one.
Every time, I would oblige and leave her small and well-decorated cabin quietly, thinking maybe next time I will ask her. “Tomorrow I will serve her two cups of coffee at one go and ask for that book,” I would tell myself. I know she won’t refuse, but she will be definitely surprised by the request of a coffee-serving guy.
Even before I would leave her cabin, a group of impatient reporters, editors, designers and photographers would make a queue in front of my trolley which I park at the entrance of her room. I would serve them quickly and push it to small rectangular cubicles allotted for other workers. In the process, I used to exchange a few glances, return a few charitable smiles and often used to get leftover biscuits, cakes, and snacks. I reveled in all these bounties, as I was getting everything without ever asking for anything from our village deity, who my mother used to tell me fulfils the desires of all mortals. “But you have to tell the deity with honesty your heartfelt desire. You will get it,” that is what she told me when I was a young boy. I never felt the need to ask for anything except after my father died. I thought, I should have asked the deity to give my father a few more years to live on and nourish the soil which he diligently did sowing bajra and jowar in it. I guess the thought came pretty late to me. By that time the tall and well-built man that my father was turned into ashes, which we later immersed in a river in our neighbouring village.
Strangely, on that day I want to ask the deity to bestow me with the power to own that book. I failed to muster the courage to ask her. No matter how much I tried, those few words to ask her to lend me that yellow-blue beauty eluded me.
As a last resort I prayed hard to the deity. In my dream, I saw the deity as huge as a banyan tree coming to my room and gifting me the book. Next morning I knew the book would be mine. As I went to serve her morning coffee, she was absent from her room. The book instead of its usual place was lying on the floor. As a reflex I picked it up to put it back in its original place. Suddenly the deity appeared from nowhere and asked me to take the book and hide it inside my over-sized uniform. “This is stealing. I am not a thief,” I trembled. “Nonsense, do whatever I say,” the deity ordered and vanished and nowhere to be seen. I put the book inside my uniform and left her room. Nobody got a whiff of the missing book, not even the owner. I started sleeping with the book and waited for the appropriate moment to open it and smell the musty fragrance. As a daily routine I kept serving her coffee and she behaved absolutely normal with me. That gave me the confidence that nobody has discovered the fact that the book was missing, or perhaps it was too inconsequential for them to bother so much about it.
Fourteen days later, I was summoned by a group of management officials who asked me to quit with immediate effect. They denied me my dues too and asked me to leave my uniform at the washroom. As I folded my coffee-stained uniform, I could smell the helplessness of my desire----the desire of an illiterate man to read an English book. Without the uniform I looked like a clown who had been caught stealing. That night I decided to open the book. All I could see was blurry black words. As I wiped off my tears, I saw my reflection staring back at me in pity out of those pages.
