We are surrounded by tottering piles of papers. I have lost track of the number of sheets I have looked at and number of staple pins I have torn apart to be able to read the document easily. The back of my neck is burning up; a feverish reaction to both the stress and the heat. We have been in this storehouse since morning, but we haven’t found the document we came for.

The storehouse is a square shaped building with a tin roof. There are hundred of shelves, going all the way up to the ceiling. A scrawny boy with the agility of a monkey goes up and down a ladder if you point to some document you’d want to see but is beyond your reach.

The enthusiasm we showed when we started petered off within the first hour of entering this dungeon like place. After a couple of hours, I began to lose judgement. Everything seemed like the right document. The letters formed one large mass, like ants attacking a sticky toffee, and the papers started crumbling under my sweaty palms.

Now, I felt like I was caged in and I could never leave. It had been five hours and the document was still on the loose. There was one last box of papers left on the top shelf and I asked the boy to get it for me. He went up the ladder, breathing heavily, and tried to come down holding the cardboard box. He fell off the ladder at the same moment that I started to warn him that he would.

After we picked him up from between the boxes and their contents, we realized that the little accident had brought on a graver one. The piles had all collapsed and there was no way of now differentiating the papers we had gone through from the ones we hadn’t.

I walked out of the storehouse, into the blinding sunlight, and kept walking until the urge to shoot someone had passed. Behind me, somewhere in the storehouse, the monkey child continued to swing from shelf to shelf without a care in the world.