G. P.

PUTNAMS SONS

A NOTE FROM SHANTHI SEKARAN

My childhood library occupied a healthy wedge of land in Sacramento, a few doors down from
the Chung King Chinese Buffet. It was a round, wood-shingled building, motherly in shape and
scope. I would go there every week, when I was eight or maybe nine. Every time I went, Id
look for one book in particular. Into the Unknown, a black and white catalogue of hauntings,
ghosts and poltergeists. I remember the cover: pale grey with a silvery flock pattern, like the wall
paper of an old house. Id allow myself only quick peeks at the pages: a blur of light by a
stairway, a blur of light by a china cabinet, pale-eyed Edwardian children.
The images would follow me home, from day into night. They would send me running from the
kitchen to my bedroom in the evenings, afraid that if I stood still and looked around, Id catch
my own blur of light, lurking by a mirror, waiting in the dark and unfathomable corners of my
childhood home.
Now, its 2016, and Im a mother in America. Ghosts dont scare methe living do. The older I
get, the more I have to say goodbye, the more fervently I hope that ghosts are real. A ghost is a
memory stamped onto the present. A book is a memory spun into words and imagery and
creative impulse. Memory has a smell. Its the smell of old paper.
Now, when I take my two boys to our own library, they head straight for the computers. I
always stop them. I make them look at the books first. One day, maybe, theyll come back and
find a book that used to thrill them. Theyll look for it, and it will probably be gone. So many
things, at some point in their lives, will be gone. I see my sons, grown into men, sadder from
life, and stronger. Their mother gone, a lifetime away. But thats just me, frothing my
melancholy. For now, one boy is three and the other eight. They bound from shelf to shelf,
picking rapidly, never second-guessing themselves. For two boys with chocolate muffin stains
on their cheeks, books arent ghosts. Books are friends.
That night, they settle into bed and I read to them. Avi fades quickly into sleep, as he always has.
Ash, the baby, never wants to miss out. He stays up long past bedtime. When I finish reading,
we sit together in the wordless dark. Im in my sons room, in a house with my name on the
mortgage. But for those few minutes, the echo of a story receding into the night, I could be back
home, a child again in a house of dark corners and endless, pitch-black corridors. My father
could be sitting next to me, his own words trailing into silence. Books erase the lines between
past and present, living and dead. I am child and mother, reader and audience, haunter and
haunted. And in a neighborhood library, half a block down from a Chinese buffet, an old friend
sits, its pages stamped with memories, with quivers of light, hovering on stairways, seared with
longing, gazing out of mirrors, and waiting.

Shanthi Sekaran
LUCKY BOY Shanthi Sekaran G.P. Putnams Sons January 10, 2017 9781101982242 $27.00