The Amethyst Library is on the first floor of a college building. It has two sections: one where all the books are kept. It is a bright sort of room, dusty but maintained in such a way that if you go in search of a book and are following the right map, you will find the book…and maybe even something else.
The second section is a reading room. Again filled with light because one of its walls is dedicated to windows that face east. It is an unusually hot room as well but no one ever complains. The sunlight is worth the heat.
Amethyst, as it is called by its patrons, collects books, yes, but it is also a library of lost souls. Its keeper, Sarita, has a board outside the library warning students and ghosts alike to be respectful of each other and to not drive anyone away. This is a safe space, the board goes on to say, and everyone is welcome.
Though none of the students have seen any hovering shapes, the board always gives them pause. And the ghosts…well only Sarita can tell you why they would haunt a library. But she thinks it has something to do with their hunger for stories.
Usually the lost souls who wander into Amethyst blur into a ball of white for Sarita, she can still tell you which light goes where if you ask. She is intimately familiar with them, why they’re lost and how they can find themselves. But she does not interfere with the process. The souls, just like they wander in, also wander out once they have found what they’re looking for. That’s how Amethyst works, mysteriously but always gently.
*
A boy finds himself in the library. He is not lost, he raises his chin in defiance when he reads the board, and does not care to be found. He has come inside Amethyst because he’s following a girl.
It takes him a while to find her, hiding as she is in the business section. She’s sitting on the floor, a copy of Henry Fayol’s marketing principles open in her lap. The boy cannot imagine sitting on the dirty floor but he makes no noise. He simply starts looking at the shelves, hoping a clever topic to begin a conversation will occur to him.
*
A girl is definitely lost. She came to college thinking this is where life will start to make sense. But after two weeks of classes, she is lost, shattered and on the brink of giving up. When her parents ask her how they can help, she has no answer. When her therapist asks her to make a plan of action, the page she so carefully tore from her English language notebook sits empty still on her study table.
She has another session tomorrow and she cannot turn up with an empty page. She needs one entry on that page, just one, to prove to herself, her parents and her therapist that she is not completely useless. She has come to Amethyst as a last resort. She has heard stories of course – from classmates and seniors. She does not know how much of it is true but the board calling this a place for lost souls to rest makes her heart beat faster so she enters.
She doesn’t know how this finding works but remembers a lesson from her therapist: let things come to you. So she wanders and inexplicably, finds herself stopping in the business section.
She becomes aware of the warm body near her almost as soon as it enters the section. She does not look up. She’s almost sure it’s a human body and not a ghost. Ghosts she expects would be cold.
The book she has in her lap is fascinating. It talks about human behaviour and how that affects purchase decisions. Is this what she wants to study then?
“You’re not from marketing,” he says. She knows it’s a he. “I would remember because I’m in marketing.”
She looks up and sees a boy, wiry, a smile on his face and an eyebrow raised. “What’s marketing like? Is it as fascinating as this?”
He laughs. She likes his laugh. “I don’t think anyone but Professor Gala finds Henry Fayol fascinating.”
“Tell me more,” she says by way of invitation and he, despite the dirty ground, sits next to her.
Sarita sees them and smiles. She knows the two of them will go on to date, marry and then divorce. It’ll all be horribly amicable and though the girl will not return, the boy will return to Amethyst, this time accepting that he is lost. He will find something again, Sarita smiles brightly at how that story will pan out, because that’s the nature of things – you find some, you lose some.
Perhaps she can save them from that particular heartbreak but she knows the wisdom of Amethyst should not be questioned. So she finds a few more books of interest, even her favourite Michael Porter’s Five Forces, and puts them in a corner where they’ll find it, eventually.
When she looks up, she sees one of the ghosts thumbing through The Iliad in the literature section. She shakes her head. This one has been with her the longest. She wonders if it’ll ever find itself. Well, at least in the meantime, she thinks as the ghost ambles towards her, holding the book aloft like it’s a trophy, it makes for good conversation.
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tales of Suchita 
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