Author: Manjula Padmanabhan

Manjula Padmanabhan is an author, playwright and cartoonist. Her play HARVEST won the 1997 Onassis Award for Theatre. Her weekly comic strip SUKIYAKI appears in Business Line, Chennai. Her two most recent novels are Escape and The Island of Lost Girls, both set in a brutal future world.
<i>Libraries</i>
Issue 4 – January 2018, Spotlight

Libraries

When I was eleven years old, one of my favourite places was the Nielson Hays Library in Bangkok, Thailand. It was a huge building, with tall ceilings and white-washed walls. On days when my Mother needed the car, the driver would collect me from school and leave me at the Library to spend an hour or two on my own. Nielson Hays Library, Bangkok (Photo: neilsonhayslibrary.com) That library had a special room just for children's books. It was a tiny building with wooden walls, tiled roof and polished-wood floor, surrounded by water, like a moat. You had to step across a little bridge to get inside. It was like being inside a castle made for books. I planned to read every book in there, in alphabetical order! But of course, I soon decided against that because I preferred some kinds of bo...