The Midnight Palace - Carlos Ruiz Zafon [23]
They crossed the garden via a narrow tunnel that had been hacked through the undergrowth and led straight to the main entrance of the house. A light breeze stirred the leaves and whistled through the stone arches of the Palace. Ben turned and looked at Sheere, grinning from ear to ear.
‘What do you think of it?’
‘It’s … different,’ Sheere replied, not wishing to dampen his enthusiasm.
‘Sublime,’ Ben corrected her, marching on, oblivious to any other opinion regarding the charms of the Chowbar Society’s headquarters.
Sheere smiled to herself and let him lead the way, thinking how much she would have liked to have known this group and this mansion during the years it had served as their refuge and sanctuary. The place exuded that aura of magic and dreams that rarely exists beyond the blurred memories of our early years. It didn’t matter that it was only for one night; she was looking forward to paying the admission fee to the almost extinct Chowbar Society.
‘My secret,’ she began, ‘is in fact the story of my father. The two are inseparable. I never met him, and I have no memory of him except what I learned from the lips of my grandmother and what I read in his books and notebooks. Yet, however strange this may seem to you, I’ve never felt closer to anyone in the world. Even though he died before I was born, I’m sure he will wait for me until I join him, and on that day I’ll finally be able to see for myself that he is just as I imagined him: the best man who ever existed.
‘I’m not so different from you. I didn’t grow up in an orphanage, but I’ve never known what it’s like to have a home or someone to talk to, apart from my grandmother, for longer than a month. We lived in trains, in strangers’ houses, on the streets, never having a place we could call home or somewhere to return to. During all these years the only friend I’ve had is my father. And as I’ve said, although he was never there, I discovered everything I know about him from his books and the memories of my grandmother.
‘My mother died giving birth to me, and I’ve had to live with the sorrow of having no memory of her. The only image I have is the reflection I’ve found in my father’s writings. Of all his books, including the treatises on engineering and the thick tomes I never really understood, my favourite was always a slim volume of stories called Shiva’s Tears. He wrote it just before his thirty-fifth birthday, when he was busy developing the idea of Calcutta’s first railway line and a revolutionary station made of steel he dreamed of building in the city. A small publishing house in Bombay printed only six hundred copies of the book, but my father never saw a single rupee. I have a copy. It’s a small black volume with the words “Shiva’s Tears by L. Chandra Chatterghee” embossed in gold on the spine.
‘The book is divided into three parts. The first focuses on his ideas for a new nation built on the spirit of progress, on technology, railways and electricity. He called it “My country”. The second part describes a fabulous house he planned to build for himself and his family once he’d managed to amass the fortune he longed for. He describes every corner, every room, every colour and every object in such detail that no architect’s plan could equal it. He called this part of the book “My house”. The third part, called “My mind”, is a collection of the short stories and fables he’d been writing ever since he was a boy. My favourite is the one that gives the book its title. It’s very short. Here it is…’
A long time ago Calcutta was struck down by a terrible plague that took the lives of its children, so that little by little, as the inhabitants grew older, they lost all hope for the future. To resolve the situation, Shiva set off on a long journey