He was back early. The room was the same. The same old room but then he was back early and that was new! The winter evening was just about settling down. Gulls in the sky, impeccably poised between a scream and an odd chatter. The light outside was slowly dying out. The light inside too...inside that same old room too...dying out too!
The room generally had to wait a hell of a lot in the dark before he would come up and enter round about nine at night. When he switched the light on at that hour, he could well imagine the glistening dark in which the room would wait for him. For him! Only him? No, the light too...for the light too to come back.
And finally for once at least, he was back early! The faintly lulling afterglow was lazily stretching itself across the room like a brooding old tiger on his somewhat reluctant night prowl. It was a room of lonely objects, waiting for their master.
And then as if out of nowhere, a hand with those precisely sculpted fingers working their way towards the lock and the exciting sound of the key turning in it, enlivened the waiting objects in a glistening sweep of light. The door opened slowly. He entered. As soon as he switched the light on, the twilight tiger jumped out of the window and became a vertical painting on a nearby tree. The two lights - inner and outer, natural and artificial - met at a point beyond his vision.
He had always wondered what happened to things in a room when it was locked up. He always believed in the life of things - a silent and yet unruffled life which would come to the surface only in the absence of a human being. No, our central character did not believe in ghosts or anything like that. He simply believed that all the inanimate objects had a life of their own in this planet. From the brush with which he would clean his teeth first thing in the morning to the feces that he would let loose immediately afterwards, everything spoke to him! The bristles moving right and left in his mouth would produce a sound wherein he would find a noisy murmur and the sound of emitting the waste at the time of defecation would appear to him to be a kind of speech! But then he often asked himself if he was guilty of reading speech into all kinds of sounds? Was all sound nothing but speech? Was this all inside his mind? Though he made room for these doubts and questions, he always concluded by saying to himself: "No, no, I am sure, everything speaks...everything writes itself in this big white world!"
The room with its silent world of objects gave testimony to his reflections. On his return, he would often find these little changes: the alarm clock to the right of the table instead of the left, the tiniest elephant in the first position in a row of five while it should be at the last! As if some of these objects were playing a 'spot the difference' game with him. But no, he was not unnerved by these changes or anything like that. He considered them to be emanations of a demand for love and attention which pulsated the world of the so-called lifeless things! As if the tiny elephant wanted a warm caress from its master or the alarm clock craved for a little reshuffling of its position rocking in the hands of its master while being pushed from one side of the table to another. He was only happy to spot the difference!
And then he was back early, to the great delight of his things. The same old things in that same old room. The same old dear things in that same old dear room. The old sun gone for the day; the old winter evening settling down like an octogenarian finding it difficult to bend low and the old afterglow replaced by the old light, switched on by the old hands of the old master! A gallery of the old and yet something new, as if to celebrate the master's unusually early return.
(to continue)
