I've been saving this up for the middle of the night and now it's raining, so the world's still on my side. Presently I will get up and transport myself to more than five years back, sitting on slightly frayed but still-majestic carpet at an optimum position that gives me access to wide window, doorway and back of armchair. The parents are buying flower bulbs and jewellery and touristy things off boats, I'm looking at a book I picked off a shelf. It's a fantastic shelf to sit by because of the books left behind there, Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, MM Kaye, an old MAD magazine, pages full of Spanish and Urdu, this houseboat room is very nearly responsible for keeping me from the rest of Srinagar. Everyone seems to have signed their book before placing it on a shelf, and there's this one book I pick up, Growing Pains by Emily Carr, because it has a flyleaf filled with awkward cramped writing, all caps, talking about who she was. Her beauty and humility will live on. Sentences like that. So I start reading, and it's the last day we have in Srinagar so of course it's a stupid idea, we go out and later I eat something bad and get sick and vomit out of a window into the lake and sleep it off and before I know it I'm looking at the book ten minutes before we leave, wondering whether I should whack it. To this day I'm sorry I didn't.

Trying to communicate how it haunted me will be pointless, I only got through a few chapters and I forgot all about it these past two years but some of the rawness of the writing must have remained, like the paintings in the book maybe. I'm not forgetting those. End of story, Flipkart to the rescue - saw it, ordered it, and it arrived yesterday but like I said, I've been saving it up. I'm scared to annoyance that I'll pick it up and find out it was just an ordinary book but more than anything else I'm scared it won't be the same book now that I'm not sixteen anymore.