Have I Missed It?

I am not a book person but my bus is not due yet. Reluctantly, I check with the roadside hawker of old, musty books. A tattered book with faded cover catches my eye. 

"How much?" I ask. 

“Fifty rupees, each and every one of them. Good for time-pass,” the hawker answers, barely looking at me.

“Thirty-five?” I taunt with no intention to buy.

“Forty, or you can walk off!” 

Forty bucks, that is less than what one spends on nail polish these days. I make an impulsive decision and pay the hawker. I climb into my waiting bus and open the threadbare book, ready to start reading. The bus lurches forward as I notice that some words on the first page are underlined with a faint pencil. Intrigued, I make the first sentence from the underlined words. ‘You’ is the first word. ‘Are’ is second. ‘A’ is third. Followed by ‘Moron’. The period is circled too. 

YOU ARE A MORON.

Am I a moron? It should irritate me if I take it personally but I smile. Thankfully no one in the bus is looking at me. I start looking for the next set of underlined words and count them. There are twelve of them. Clearly they are not in a linear order, unlike the first sentence. That was easy, but these? I look hard at the challenge: 

Into-That-like-why-you-sucked.-this-are-is-something-

I try to construct a proper sentence from the above mentioned words and the period but it takes an awful lot of time till I get them right. Almost fifteen minutes!

THAT IS WHY YOU ARE SUCKED INTO SOMETHING LIKE THIS.

Next one is short and easier to arrange.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE. 

The following set of words is complicated and it agonizes me for a good thirty minutes. I arrange and rearrange the words, this way and that way, but it gets more and more confusing. I write them down in the margin of the book for a better feel but no result!

I look out of the window, I look at other passengers, I check my nails; but the puzzle comes back to me and taunts me again. I am about to give up when the sentence forms itself like magic.

THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS LIKE YOU, MERELY PASSING THROUGH, WITH NO SENSE OF PURPOSE OR DIRECTION.

The next sentence is again easy:

NOW STOP THIS NONSENSE. 

I turn the page and make a list of the underlined words.

Labyrinth - Coaxing - At – Frozen - Imparting - Surmised -Somber - Zephyr - Ghost - Seamier -Churn - Turnstile -Pluto - Craggy - Hoax - Jar - Duffer - Layers - Buttons - Dingbat 

This set of words is apparently a random mess; nothing like clear nouns or verbs. No connecting words like 'and', 'or', 'than', or 'which' to help me in anyway. After half an hour of struggle, I conclude that this bunch doesn't make any sense at all and there is no period to suggest the end. There is no logic here, no pattern to speak of. Some words like ‘surmise’, ‘zephyr’, ‘dingbat’ and ‘turnstile’ are totally alien to me. I have never come across them, let alone use them knowingly.
           I feel thoroughly pissed and try to read the book. It is boring. I look out of the window. Still more stops to go. Irritated beyond limit, I ruffle the pages, from beginning till the end. Almost all pages have words underlined with a pencil. To hell with it, I am not a moron, I mumble and go straight to the last page. There are more underlined words indeed! That last set on the final page is easy to crack because it is mercifully short: it has a ‘YOU’ to begin with, and an exclamation mark to get a sense of the ending.

YOU HAVE MISSED YOUR STOP!

If this is not enough, there is a final handwritten word, to rub the salt in:

IDIOT 

I snap the book shut and look around in panic. The bus is speeding like a bullet. Everything outside the window is a crazy blur; there are no passengers, there is nobody in the driver's seat. There is no telling whether I am well past my stop or way ahead of it. 

Out of options now, I start reading the book the way I have never read before: one word at a time, one sentence after the other, one paragraph followed by the next, one page after another...