The girl from the library

In my second year of college, I noticed that every book I wanted from the library had already been borrowed by the same person. The card at the back showed her name, again and again, always a week before me.

It became a game. I would wait for her to return a book, then take it out. Sometimes she underlined sentences in pencil, very lightly, and I would read her underlined lines first.

One day, inside a collection of Kamala Das poems, I found a small note tucked between the pages: "Whoever keeps borrowing my books after me — do you like the poems as much as I do?"

I wrote back on the same note: "More, I think. Especially the ones you underline."

We left notes in books for a month before we met, at the library café, both of us too nervous to eat. She was shorter than I had imagined and laughed louder.

We were together for two years. It ended, gently, when she moved away for her master's. I still have the notes, all forty-three of them, in a biscuit tin. I think the best love stories have librarians as silent witnesses.