White Nights in Madras
She was in her eighties, yet mentally alert. A government pensioner, she had retired after long service as a high-school teacher. Though fragile, she kept to disciplines she had practiced for decades. She considered every day a blessing. Lately, she had been experiencing fatigue and weakness; at times, she forgot small chores of daily living. She maintained a worn diary with the faded letters “1999” on the cover, where she documented all expenditures. Sometimes she made wrong entries or miscalculated because of her age, and then she would break her head over the numbers. Her apartment always carried a peculiar old-age smell. On Fridays, a faint scent of jasmine, fresh flowers, and camphor lent the place a small, almost divine aura. Every afternoon, she slept for two to three hours. A voracious reader, she was revisiting books she had loved in her youth. One was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s White Nights, a copy she had received as a gift on her twenty-fifth birthday from her first lo...
