Book Excerpts

#FirstLook | Paper Moon by Rehana Munir

It was an unusually busy day at Paper Moon. All the seats of the café were filled. The cash counter had been in active mode pretty much since the shutters opened. The phone hadn’t stopped ringing. And Frances D’Monte had everything to do with it. Frances wrote a weekly column in the Mumbai Banter newspaper about reading and writing. And on that particular Wednesday, she had written about Paper Moon. Not just a stray mention or a few lines of recommendation – an entire column on Fiza and her store. A week earlier, Frances had walked into the shop, filling Fiza with a familiar combination of excitement and trepidation. She had asked if Fiza had some

time to spare and then gone on to ask questions about the shop – how she had set it up, what plans she had for it, how things had gone that far. Fiza found it surreal to be sitting in a world of her making, speaking into a dictaphone, looking into Frances’s implacable eyes. In there, there was absolutely no scope for flakiness or subterfuge. Now, when the piece had appeared in the paper, she was charmed to see how she had been quoted word for word. ‘Ma’am, you actually wrote what I said,’ she said excitedly into the receiver after reading the piece. ‘Yes, that’s how it works, usually. It’s called reported speech,’ Frances replied drily. Fiza was surprised at the attention the store was receiving thanks to the piece. Noor had cut out the article neatly, just like she used to do with other columns and quotes she liked in the papers. They would all go into an old coffee jar with a rusty cap, which was never opened, except when there was a new addition. It just lay there near the TV table, a talisman of bottled-up wisdom. But she had other plans for Fiza’s writeup. She had it laminated and instructed her daughter to pin it up at the store. ‘But, Ma, when people are already at the store, why advertise it?’ Fiza complained. ‘For once, just be quiet and do this, Fizu. Put it up where people can see it. Not in some dark corner,’ Noor insisted. The conversation was redundant. Down at the store, Bharti Aunty had already put up the article on the café soft board using colourful push-pins. ‘Paper Moon’, said the headline simply, exhilaratingly. It carried a biggish photograph – a wide shot of the store, with Fiza sitting on her beloved Chor Bazar bench, pretending to read Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting.

‘Why couldn’t you send a proper picture ya, Fizu? Can’t even see your face properly. It’s just books and pretty furniture.’ ‘Bharti Aunty, sometimes you and Ma sound exactly the same. It’s never been my ambition to…’ ‘Fizu,’ Bharti Aunty interrupted, looking awkwardly over Fiza’s shoulder. ‘What?’ Fiza said, turning around. It was Dhruv, but un-Dhruv-like. Beard and satchel. Black T-shirt and cork sandals. The globetrotter-comes-home look. He was carrying two books. One was a hardcover and the other, a paperback. ‘Hey,’ Fiza said, trying to appear calm despite a wildly fluttering heart. ‘Oh shut up,’ she was saying to herself under her breath, but it wasn’t working. ‘Hey,’ Dhruv replied and handed her the books, as if it were just another casual meeting at the college library. ‘Thanks. But you shouldn’t have…’ He wrapped his arms around her in reply, pecking her gently on her cheek. This was exactly what she had feared when Kavya, and later Vikram, had mentioned Dhruv’s return. That his reappearance would bring back everything she was learning to leave behind, in a big, destructive whirlpool of emotion. There were leftover feelings that she had made her peace with. But seeing him at the store was making her think that none of the feelings had truly left. She looked at the books in her hand while regaining her composure. The bigger one was a pop-up version of Alice in Wonderland. She had read about it in a magazine and gushed about it to Dhruv. Its exquisitely folded art – from the Cheshire Cat in the woods to the Red Queen’s palace with

all the card-shaped guards. The second was a Faber & Faber: The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice. They had spotted it together at Strand, but it was too expensive at the time for them to even consider. She held the two books close to her, not daring to look at the inscriptions. ‘Not too shabby,’ Dhruv said, looking around the store. Then he turned to Fiza with a smile that had in it genuine pride. ‘Not too shabby at all. How? What? When?’ The steady stream of visitors at the store did not stop, but it was as if Fiza and Dhruv had been frozen in a diorama. After the first few minutes, the conversation became easy. In a few more minutes, fun. The past year-and-a-half had been eventful for both. He was learning to find his place in a new city, a different world; she had built herself a new world altogether. And now they were narrating their stories freely, using a shorthand for jokes and references built over years. At about seven in the evening, Fiza finally walked over to see how Sudhir was doing at the counter when she had the second surprise of the day. Mystery Man was walking into the store with that half-cocky, half-endearing grin that already seemed familiar to her. She instinctively looked behind her, where Dhruv was flipping through the pages of a Bob Dylan biography. The stranger’s sudden reappearance had disturbed a very carefully assembled calm. She felt a ripple of discomfort – a mild panic – to see him resurface right at that moment, carrying with him the idea of possibilities, of the unknown. ‘Begum,’ said the stranger with that particular brand of confidence that stops just short of arrogance. ‘Good to see the piece in today’s Banter.’ ‘Thanks,’ Fiza said hurriedly, feigning a lack of interest. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I have a customer to attend to upstairs.’

Pre-order your copy now: https://harpercollins.co.in/book/paper-moon/

HCI

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