A Life-Story Through Libraries

She sits at her desk—
A thirty-year-old
Sharing her love for books
With a class full of students.
She taps the
Pen in her hand
Between her teeth,
Reminiscing.
Recording…

*

Age: Five

Lusaka.
School.
The one hour she loves—
Library Hour!
In a darkish corner
Of the library,
She curls up—
Cat-like—
Lost in her own world,
Ignoring her classmates
Who clearly don’t care
To read.

A pony-tail, shorts and tee,
Knee-length socks and
A pair of pink shoes
Wander through a maze of books.
In the yellow light,
The stacks seem tall… intimidating,
Like giant tomes against her
Puny height.
A tiny, unsure hand
Picks a book.
She buries herself—
Like the bookworm-in-the-apple-artwork
Splashed across the library wall—
Into a beanbag on an Alphabet-mat,
Immersed in a world of
Very human animals.

*

Age: Ten

Nanganallur, Chennai.
Eswari Lending Library.
Holding her mother’s hand,
She enters her first-ever
Musty-dusty-dreamy
Lending library.
Books stacked in columns,
Resting unsupported by racks
Or shelves.
Mountains of books sprawling
across the floor
Cut only by narrow gullies
To allow the reader-wanderer to pass through
The paperback-and-hardcover terrain.
Fascinated, she journeyed,
Unaware of the numerous new
Universes that lay inside
The four walls of that
Small, dingy room.

*

Age: Fifteen

K K Nagar, Chennai.
School again.
But this time,
School is science and mathematics,
Commerce and competitiveness,
Board examinations and studiousness.
School is either engineering or medicine—
For most. Not her.
In this new world,
She discovered her
Calm-in-the-storm-of-studies
Amidst metallic racks
In a not-so-well-lit room
On the first floor of her school building,
That housed mystery and adventure,
Guarded and guided by
That most loving and benign
Angel of books—
The librarian, Mrs. Krishnapriya.
Adyar, Chennai.

She’s shifted schools again.
And here,
On the red oxide floor,
Lined by short rows of
Wooden and glass shelves,
Carpeted by jute mats,
Sunlight streaming in through the jute curtains,
She squatted on the floor
Reading Shakespeare or psychology.

*

Age: Twenty

Hyderabad.
A new city.
New expectations.
She found herself
Learning,
Living,
Loving
Literature.
She stepped into the University’s library,
Vaster than any she had been to before.
Floor after floor of books, journals, magazines…
This was no longer a world,
It was a universe.
In the crisp-new-white
Or crumbling-cream sheaves of pages,
She discovered, amongst others,
Dante, Fitzgerald, Bradbury…
Poets, Playwrights, Novelists.
She devoured them, sitting at
The wooden cubicle-like
Table and chair,
Cut off from everyone else,
Taking notes for classes
Or just revelling
In intricate stories of love, loss and despair.

*

Age: Thirty

Sometimes,
Amidst the clutter of work,
She tries to steal time
To sit in the quiet nooks and crannies
Of the library in the college she now works in…
A narrow staircase leading down
From the second floor,
Like Alice in Wonderland,
She shrinks in size and grows,
Peeping through the keyhole of fiction,
Which transports her
Away
From the mad mundaneness
Of everyday realities,
Into worlds that—better or worse—
Strum that chord of empathy.

*

The libraries—
They know,
They understand,
Because they can read her soul…
Your soul.
In the silence,
She gives herself in
To the solace of book-lined walls.
Here, her unrecorded story will remain
A part
Of
Its
Memory.

Image Courtesy by Eli Digital Creative