Time in that room appeared to be decaying into eternity. The calendar on the wall had not been replaced for fourteen years. It was pale and brittle under fine dust; books wrapped in old newspapers, vials of medicines, a radio, a tape recorder and stacks of cassettes—every object a half-ghost, infinitely eroding. Touching a book meant stirring an almost audible babble. I was scared of touching anything, unless he asked me.

Shabbiness in that old man's presence was intrinsically melancholy. It attracted, instead of repelled.

His bed was hard, with a clean but old white sheet and a folded piece of oily white cloth for a pillow. Three large easy chairs sat like restful spiders around a table with a stained and grimy tablecloth. On a broken chair in a corner he kept an electric kettle in which he made plenty of tea when I called.

He gradually abandoned one of his two rented rooms, which I saw in its better days. But on my last visit, when I peered into it, I saw only outlines of quilts, cushions, pillows and sheets. He had needed all those things at one time. His brothers, with their wives and children, used to stay with him on their visits to Delhi, but for many years now, they had been staying in hotels whenever they came to India. I asked him to give up Delhi and return to Hoshiarpur, the town of his childhood memories, so I could look after him. But his nieces would be disappointed if they visited Delhi. His brothers had died, like all his friends, one by one. The stiffness and pain in his neck had become grave. Although ill and feeble from age he always struck me as incredibly cheerful and great at conversation, but now I was shaken by his loneliness.

My daughters are the age I was when I found him. It was like discovering an intellectual telemicroscope; he gave me eyes and ears. Will my daughters also find a mentor like I did, or was I unusually fortunate?

I knew him as Puri Saab, but many years later I learned his name was M. R. Puri. I had just returned from my first visit to Delhi, where I had stayed with him. He thanked me for the company. I didn't know how to react. I had never seen such politeness in such a wonderful hand: firm, graphic and elegant. I knew he was already unable to bend over a table.

When I was in school, he used to visit this town every year or two. He was a regular visitor to my uncle's coffee house; where I first saw him. When I was in college, he came to see my library. I was flattered. From what I heard about him from my uncle and his friends, he was a giant in a frail frame—a man of enormous erudition and great taste.

Merely hearing about him had addicted me to the dictionary, the atlas and the encyclopedia. My acquaintance with him shaped my relationship with books and the destiny of my reading. He was a pure lover of books, a free spirit. I do not know if he wrote anything, but his brief, occasional letters revealed a Johnsonian care for English. Illness prevented him from writing a book on Indian culture. He was sorry, but did not pity himself.

So many times I wanted to ask him, "How do you pass your time?" but the indelicacy of the question never allowed me. He had retired many years earlier from a clerical position in the bureaucracy. He still read for hours, in defiance of his condition, gracefully poised on a chair, his feet planted cautiously on the edge of the bed, elbows supported on the arms of the chair, and his firm and skinny long-fingered hands holding the book in front. Every evening, unless he had a visitor, he rode round the city for two hours on a bus. It was dangerous in his condition to travel in the crowded and undisciplined public transport of Delhi, yet he loved the city too much to miss the experience.

Illness arrived on his door rather quietly. One evening his friend's daughter gave him a book to read, and he succumbed to its literary spell. All night he read, forgetful of himself. Standing up to stretch in the pink hours of the morning, he sank to the floor. Cervical Spondylosis had caused his first and unforgettable taste of the abyss of vertigo. Never again would he forget his permanently compromised body. Every time I saw him after that, he mentioned his suffering.

Besides opening my eyes and ears, he gave me two books: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary, edited by Clement Eastwood and published in 1936, and A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, edited by Mitford M. Mathews and published in 1951. He had acquired the latter three decades earlier by spending a month's salary and took pride in telling that the shopkeeper had imported only two copies—one for a university library and the other for him. When he passed that book to me, I knew he was committing me to an idea of living. I have not really been able to use either book yet. The Rhyming Dictionary is more an heirloom than a reference book for me. The other waits patiently like a Himalayan sage for his slow disciple.

His library was hidden in cupboards. Occasionally, he would take out a book and read from it. He kept the Second Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which he once read to me the entry about Punjab. He paid Rupees 120, less than $3 today, from a junk-dealer and basked in the antiquity of the possession, conceding like a child that he could not afford a new edition.

His pension was obviously meager and he scrimped by to buy a book. His clothes were old and faded: sometimes his hand would unconsciously pass over a threadbare cuff as if to tenderly fold the poverty out of sight. But he was every inch a gentleman, a saintly gentleman, who had taken the vow of poverty and of the life of the mind. Money for him had only a limited use and beyond that he didn't stoop to bother for it.

He loved English and Sanskrit, the local, oral and alternative histories, etymology, long walks, calligraphy, conversation and the company of children. The craft of turning a fine phrase thrilled him. Passions and memories nourished his solitude and afforded a certain grave dignity to his melancholy loneliness.

I avoided picturing him dead, though at the back of my mind I knew some day the sad news would find me. Who would tell me of his passing away? Perhaps the old woman in whose house he had been a tenant all those years or maybe one autumn or spring afternoon I would go, as usual, to call on him but find the rooms locked. Maybe a stranger would answer the knock. I would be directed to the old woman, who would sob and tell the story.

One day the photojournalist had returned to Delhi to do a feature on Hoshiarpur and he needed to know its history. Who could be a better historian and storyteller for the town than Mr. Puri?

A month after, he called to inform me that the old gentleman, Mr. M. R. Puri, died six months before.

And so I received the news of his death over the telephone, half a year after he had gone. Puri Saab had managed to confer with death to spare me the pain of his funerary narrative. I had never known him to offend anyone. He was a quintessential gentleman. Even in dying.

I have not gathered the courage to visit the house in which he had lived. Four years have passed and the question remains: why can't I bear the ending of his life's tale?

I believe that the dead frequent the living in their dreams, but this man has never entered my dreams. If the dead also dream, I would like to occasionally walk into Puri Saab's dreams and see which books he has added to his inscrutable library.

Copyright © 2002 Rajesh K. Sharma. All Rights Reserved.

Rajesh K. Sharma is a writer and scholar currently residing in India.