The Photograph Inside the Book Someone Else Cropped

The second-hand bookshop near Tampines MRT is one room with shelves to the ceiling and a fan that clicks on a rotation I have timed twice and still forget. I go there on Saturdays to buy novels I will read once and keep anyway because the act of buying them feels like rescuing something. Last Saturday I found a copy of a Malaysian novel from the 1990s with a price sticker on the spine and, between pages 112 and 113, a photograph that someone had used as a bookmark and then left behind.

The photograph was a passport-size print, glossy, trimmed with scissors so that the right half of a woman’s face was missing. You could see her left eye, her cheek, the edge of a selendang, and on the right side of the cut a blank white strip where the rest of her used to be. No writing on the back. No date. No indication of who had cropped it or why — whether the scissors removed someone standing beside her, or whether the damage was accidental, a child’s craft project, a fit of anger I will never witness evidence for.

I bought the book for two dollars because of the photograph, not despite it. The shop uncle put it in a plastic bag without asking why I opened it to page 112 before paying. He has seen stranger reasons. I walked home on the bus holding the bag on my lap and thinking about all the stories that survive only as partial images in partial books sold to strangers.

Someone looked at this picture and decided the right half should not exist. I will never know who or what they were removing.

At home I scanned the photograph and tried to adjust the contrast to see if anything remained in the white strip. Nothing did. Clean cut. Deliberate, I think, though I have no proof. I put it back in the book on page 112 where I found it because that is its place now — not my grandmother’s tin, not an album, but a novel about a fisherman’s son that the previous owner may or may not have finished reading.

I read the book in a week. It is good. The ending is complete on the page, which felt like a small mercy after the photograph. When I closed the back cover I checked that the picture was still there. It was. I have not shown it to anyone. Describing it feels like enough, the way describing my grandmother’s blank page feels like enough when the tin itself is private.

Why do I write about this. Because second-hand things carry cuts made by other hands for reasons they did not document, and we receive the fragment and call it ours without knowing what we are missing. The woman’s left eye looks at me every time I open the book. The right half of her face is wherever scissors and time have taken it. The story of why is the one I cannot finish because the evidence was removed before I arrived.

I will go back to the shop next Saturday. The fan will click. The shelves will be the same. I will look for another book with something hidden inside it — not because I expect to find answers, but because incomplete things deserve a reader who notices them, and I have become that kind of reader without planning to.