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The bookcase is dusty again. Each time Prakash dusts the wall-length bookshelf, the breach between his real and ideal selves is apparent. Now at seventy-six, he knows he will never finish reading all the books he has collected. He can at best aim to brush off the dust they collect. The encyclopaedias are useless now after the internet. His father’s Man and Superman literally crumble to powder each time he picks it up. But there are those first editions of the Discovery of India and My Experiments with Truth, and The Great Short Stories of the World that once belonged to Jamshed Bhabha. He has autographed copies of books written by his friends, some of them now dead. One can’t let it all go to mites and silverfish.

He starts with the top of the bookshelf. This is where it descends soft as dew each morning, unlike the bottom rack that collects dust swept up from the floor. He drags his chair along, climbs up gingerly, shifts the curios around, and wipes. He could have cleaned the top shelf at the same time but there is no hurry. Once the top is done, he will wash and wring the dusting cloth. The shelves will take longer as all the books need to be removed, and then rearranged in the right order after the dust within the pages is thrashed out. He does this so often that he could do it blindfolded if the chair wasn’t so shaky. His knees ache. Not a good sign. The ache should have come later, with the second shelf. It must be this odd moist Bangalore weather. He decides to rest. He drags the chair to one end of the book rack, to where his turntable is, and sits. Once he catches his breath, he can dust it. He can never trust the maid, Ragini, to clean around his turntable, his antiques, and his books. She is uncouth and doesn’t care. She probably derives pleasure from spoiling things. Every time there’s glass or ceramic in the sink, she breaks it. So he sticks to steel plates for eating. On rare occasions when someone visits and uses a glass tumbler, Prakash washes it himself.

It is fine, he feels, as he pulls the microfiber cloth out from the drawer of the turntable rack. This is a lot of work but he has time. The turntable is a dust magnet, all static and acrylic on rubber stands. The pre-amp and the amplifier are almost impossible, with crumbling old connectors and audio cables at the back. Some of the dust there might date to 1978, when Mr. Rao first bought it, or 1990, when Prakash bought it off him and got it fixed. Prakash wonders where he would be now if he was still alive. Rao, of his unending conversations and boasts of a glorious past in the recording industry, his so-called musician friends who never worked out when one needed a free ticket. Prakash chuckles loudly. There’s nobody who can hear him. There is no one here but himself - but for thirty minutes, twice a day, when the maids come.

He takes his time, caressing the beautiful machine, from the time they built solid analog stuff that could be taken apart, fixed and put together again. Nowadays even cars are connected to probes and tablets to check what’s wrong. Electricians, bloody robbers, now charge for home visits just to say it can’t be fixed and you should get a new one. Life used to be simple and repairable.

He stands, takes the fake sandalwood garland off Sharada’s photo on the wall, wipes the glass and garlands it again. It is one of those pictures where her eyes seem to follow him everywhere.

Ragini has come in and is now crashing cymbals in the kitchen sink. The front door stays unlocked because she gets impatient in the time it takes Prakash to come and open the door. She has eight other houses to do after this. He puts the microfibre away and returns to the bookshelf. He gets up slowly as he has been advised to. The knee holds.

While the first dust-cloth dries, he picks up the next - a rag that used to be a T-shirt Siddharth’s ex-wife gave him. It looks a hundred years old. He thought the top shelf was done, but a corner remains. The one with the carved ebony bust from Dar es Salaam that still shines after forty years. Wish everything was as easy to clean. Done. The second shelf now, his favourite. Roald Dahl, Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Atwood and Zadie Smith all mixed up - arranged by size and colour. He picks them up four-at-a-time, flicks through pages, slams the covers together and sneezes in the cloud of sweet tickly dust it raises. He wipes all sides of the shelf before stacking the books back. He senses someone staring at him. He turns around. It is Ragini.

“Asthma hoga, Saab”, she predicts, bemused and arms akimbo, bright plastic bangles bunched at the wrists. “Cover wala shelf le lo”. He ignores her. He doesn’t expect her to understand how caged, how staged, how dead books feel on closed shelves with mothballs. She wants him to move as she needs to sweep the floor. He walks to the balcony, opens his folding chair and sits in the early sun. She will finish mopping and then be gone, thank God. He is busy and he can’t bear her constant conversation. He rubs his knee. He brushes off the dust in his scant hair. A slow shower of dandruff flies out and floats, glittering in the sun. He needs a bath. Flakes fly out every time he rubs his scalp. It doesn’t run out. He wonders if all of him turns to dust if he keeps doing this. He closes his eyes and watches the warm orange of his eyelids in the sun. He feels drowsy.

The mopping is done. He pulls himself up, walks warily across the wet floor and resumes work on the bookcase. By the time she leaves, he will be through with the second shelf. There are books he wants to re-read and some have bookmarks in them. He needs to rest and read, but perhaps he can make himself a cup of tea before he settles.

“Chai bana diya, Saab”, Ragini thrusts a chipped cup in his face. As usual, she reads his mind, but reads it wrong. He hates this cloying, mud-coloured, molasses-like thing that tastes like perpetually boiling roadside tea. When he lifts the cup he can literally smell the sugar. But he can’t throw it away, can he? He sits on the sofa. Through the rising steam, he stares at the two remaining shelves and the interminable afternoon. At this rate, he could be done with the bookshelf in two hours. That should take him to noon. And then? Well the cook comes, but she works like another impatient, silent mercenary. She too will slip in through the unlocked door with vegetables under her arm, finish cooking in thirty minutes and leave the dishes covered on the table.

The real reason he can’t lock the door is not that the maids are impatient.

It was Siddharth, his son, who insisted the door be kept unlocked at all hours, after that old idiot in the eighth block slipped in his bathroom and bled to death and no one knew. The building security knows about the door and they check. The house has cameras that Prakash resents. The bathroom door has no latch. It's all useless. It is never what you guard against. It could be the heart that stops, or a crash in sugar levels, or just diarrhoea that one could die of. People die of mosquito bites. People with prostate issues don’t latch the bathroom anyway.

The tea is cold now. That is a good reason to throw it down the sink and make a cup the way he wants, just in time before the cook, whats-her-name, comes. She doesn’t let him touch the kitchen, after that time he left the gas on. He can wait till she is done with her cooking. The dusting, too, can wait. There is time. He has chosen his book for the afternoon. Murakami it is. After the Quake. It has short stories so he can start and stop wherever he likes.

“Ja rahi hoon Saab”. The maid is leaving.

“Haan Ragini, time pe aana kal”, he reminds her, for no reason at all, to come on time tomorrow. As if time is really important.

“Saab?”, she hesitates.

“Kya hua? Paisa chahiye? Chutti? Tum Siddharth se baat karo”. His son was managing everything by remote control anyhow. He should be the one deciding on her pay, her leaves. Why should Prakash get into it? Back in the day it was different… She is still standing.

“Kya hua?”

“Saab, aap ko pehle bhi bola hai. Mera naam Kanta hai. Ragini bahut pehle kaam karti thi. Woh chali gayi”. Oh, so she isn't Ragini. Prakash wasn’t sure how it made any difference. But wasn’t she… Maybe she was right. Ragini was someone else.

She bangs the door as she leaves.

Prakash walks to the sofa and sits with Murakami. A sunbeam slants in, and specs of golden dust cavort in and out of it. He looks at them for a long time, hypnotised. One could spend a lifetime battling dust. The apartment is on the eleventh floor. It has sliding windows. He dusts every day. The maid isn't allowed to because she breaks things, and because he needs something to do. But she sweeps and mops every day. The air purifier is always on. And yet the dust doesn’t go anywhere. It dances in the air, sparkling, sliding in and out of the beam as if nothing has happened. As if nothing ever happens.