Despite my being a perpetual latecomer and a habitual violator of the rules of the tenancy, he was a calm and an uncomplaining landlord. I was told that he had outsmarted his son both in personableness and strength till he lost him to the skirmishes at the border of the country last year. The neighbours said that the death of his wife and then that of his son had sedated all spurts of irritability that once existed in him and all that could flow out of him now were opaque gazes and warm nods. In fact, to my uneasiness, both my friends and his acquaintances used to say that I resembled him a lot in appearance.

The only thing that irked me about him was his habit of giving me a fiction book every month. The day I would pay him the rent, he would come to my room and hand over the book himself with a ‘you will like it’, a ‘this one is better than the previous one’, or a ‘try this one’ on his lips. I tried insisting that I was an engineer and had no interest or time for such books. But he would walk away without replying.

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I kept piling up the books when a couple of years later my landlord passed away and I had to move out of that house. While cleaning up, I took the book on the top of the pile, 'The Museum of Innocence’ by Orhan Pamuk, and fiddled with it when some cash flew out of it. I wondered and collected the cash. I then took the other book and ruffled it to find more cash. All the books had cash kept in them and the book at the bottom of the pile had a note too. ‘I cannot charge the look-alike of my son for living in his home.'

But the landlord was already buried by then and I could hug only the books that I had never opened before.