It was a year of waiting, of being in the limbo. He was essentially alone, waiting to escape, waiting to emigrate, as he lived on the kindness of others, under a c/o address. And one night, after being treated to dinner in one of the many student’s messes, he was invited to go along to visit a friend of this friend. He entered a room overflowing with paper; the floor covered six inches deep with books, old newspapers, research articles on computer science, posters, pamphlets etc - a paper-ish black hole. Conversation revolved around this and that, the conversation of slackers, the best of all conversations as he leaned against an edge of the writing table, queasy about having to park his feet atop a mound of paper.

And when it veered around to books, and at his mention of his attempts at writing poetry, that friend of his friend jumped off the bed on which he was perched like a bearded gnome, and dug though the strata of paper, close to the window of set against the far wall of that room. The bearded gnome soon found what he was looking for – a slim paperback volume, Vintage Press, with a blackish grey cover. He handed it over, and commanded that it be read in a single sitting. The title – “By The Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept” – was evocative enough for him to know he will follow that command of reading the book in a single setting.

And he did, not that night, but weeks later when he stumbled into the graciously lent space in the middle of a night at around 3 AM, the thirst of his mind inflamed with a conversation with a teenage burning girl. And in that insomniac night, he picked up Elizabeth Smart’s book, and held it against his ear, where it immediately sunk roots and become an echoing blade of grass. How could it not, when it begins like this:

By Grand Central Station, I sat down and wept: I will not be placated by the mechanical motions of existence, nor find consolation in the solicitude of waiters who notice my devastated face. Sleep tries to seduce me by promising a more reasonable tomorrow. But I will not be betrayed by such a Judas of fallacy: it betrays everyone: it leads them into death. Everyone acquiesces, everyone compromises. They say, As we grow older, we embrace resignation. But O, they totter into it blind and uncompromising. And from their sin, the sin of accepting such a pimp to death, there is no redemption. It is the sin of damnation.

And then within the first twenty pages, hits high baroque notes, a single taut string of a cello thrummed with a thumb again and again, less of a novella and more of a score:

I am standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my terror to face the moment I most desire. Apprehension and the summer afternoon keep drying my lips, prepared at ten- minute intervals all through the five-hour wait…

But he never passes anywhere near me without every drop of my blood springing to attention. My mind may reason that the tenseness only registers neutrality, but my heart knows no true neutrality was ever so full of passion…

I am over-run, jungled in my bed, I am infested with a menagerie of desires: my heart is eaten by a dove, a cat scrambles in the cave of my sex, hounds in my head obey a whipmaster who cries nothing but havoc as the hours test my endurance with an accumulation of tortures…

Under the waterfall he surprised me bathing and gave me what I could no more refuse than the earth can refuse the rain. Then he kissed me and went down to his cottage…

Absolve me, I prayed, up through the cathedral redwoods, and forgive me if this is sin. But the new moss caresses me And the water over my feet and the ferns approved me with endearments: My darling, my darling, lie down with us now for you also are earth whom nothing but love can sow…

Gently the woodsorrel and the dove explained the confirmation and guided my return. When I came out of the woods onto the hill, I had pine needles in my hair for a bridalwreath, and the sea and the sky and the gold hills smiled benignly…

But how can I go through the necessary daily motions, when such an intense fusion turns the world to water? The overflow drenches all my implements of trivial intercourse. I stare incomprehension at the simplest question from a stranger, standing as if bewitched, half-smiling, like an idiot, feeling this fiery fluid spill out of my eyes…

...

For a few weeks after that night, he scoured bookstores (not that they were many in that book-starved country) for a copy of this book, and never did find it. So on a winter afternoon he found himself in a ‘Xerox’ shop, which was frequented by students getting copies made of expensive foreign textbooks, asking for a photocopy of this book to be made; a copy he would turn to often in the next few months of hiding and waiting, a copy that would become a votive offering to the girl he loved without preconditions – the hardest kind of love - when he left to on a iron bird to keep up a mangled assignation with a woman on whom he had - without much thought, just because - hinged his magical-realistic dreams.

...

Now, many years later, as coincidences go, on the same day he received a sign that it - love born of kindness, kindness engendered by love - was so, he notices an essay in a newspaper by a son on a book of biography he has written to explore the lives that formed the subject matter of 'By The Grand Central Station'.

Perhaps that book is devoured best in single settings - though I keep coming back to it. That bit about smoking resonated for years.