The Noose as the Muse

I kept the company of Hangwoman, a novel by K.R. Meera for more than two months, leaving it from time to time to attend to more worldly duties. But the novel kept calling me back to itself. There are different ways of reading a novel. There are readers who do not want the real world to contaminate or pollute their reading. They want to start and then reach the finishing point in the shortest possible time as if they were in a race. But there could be another way of reading a novel, which is to stay with it for a while. To give it time. Because time is what constitutes a novel. To feel it in your bones is what makes the reader of novels different from other readers.