For me, library visits mean a lot as can be seen from my
trademark huge bags that can carry huge tomes and a slight damage to the right
shoulder from carrying them around regularly. So are the constant mind-fogs
that come from having too many things on the mind such as the home and the
heart, the things to buy and the things to get rid of.
Libraries and I have a long history of events- finding them,
losing them, misplacing them and of reading them so much at the cost of
eyesight and a sense of reality. When I was doing my M.Phil, I had placed a
book on the Automatic Book Return Kiosk in the Central Library, only the find
that the machine refused to read the book and it was a kind-looking staff who
enlightened me that the book belonged to the College Library and not to the
Central Library.
I had my excuse that I was juggling a baby, a thesis and a
household and that it was difficult to keep track of all the library books that
I had taken. Those were the days of the late returns and heavy dues and
mind-fogs resulting from having too much on my hands.
It was in the same library that I had a spat with a guy who
formed a new parallel queue for a pretty little thing and called my attention
to it, when I have been standing in a straight queue for around fifteen minutes.
However, I was too embarrassed after my mercurial outburst, that too in English
that I had not gone to the library for a few months.
For someone who spends a good deal of time in the library,
it is at times a little disappointing to see a new notice on fresh arrivals: “Writing
or marking on books is a punishable offence”. On seeing this notice the first
time, I could not help thinking of my college days, when I was more or less an
accidental scholar who found the right books at the nick of time, on the eve of
the exam and gorged upon them as if there was all the time in the world to read
them.
Studying English literature was no fun as most people
believe. I have had so many relatives and friends tell me, “Oh! All you have to
do is read novels”. Sadly, it was not true as I discovered during the second
and third years of my graduate study. Buying all books needed was out of the
question as most of them were unavailable or way too expensive. So, hunting for
books in the library was part of the routine and with time, I was familiar with
most of the shelves and what they held.
The city libraries were part of these book-hunting trips
though most of what I read was books that were no part of the syllabus. Only at
the beginning and the end of a semester did I think of text books; otherwise it
was all Agatha Christie and all the readable ones. But at the end of each
semester, on my serious visits to the library, I was always fascinated by the
comments and notes on the margins made by some previous reader and at times, I
even recognised the handwritings of my teachers in some books.
Yes, I love it when my number is stamped as the first user
on fresh arrival. There is certainly a pleasure in handling a new book: the
fresh smell of crisp pages and the ideas that look new and inviting but a
much-used and well-thumbed library book offers much more for a reader and
student. Just like the books that I had seen in those days, the books left
traces of the ones who had read them before- markings, numberings, explanations,
critical comments and more not phone numbers as feared by present day
librarians. The meanings written next to difficult words or the names of poetic
devices with explanations, these texts were most probably used by teachers for
their classes.
In the present age and its demand of annotated editions
(that say more than the writer), the ordinary library books on English
literature could supply easy reading just by the fact that they were read
through the minds of good scholars who could chew and digest the work by
marking key words and underlining what was important. But I do remember a girl
who studied with me, who had seen me underline a sentence in a library book and
screamed “That’s a library book!” in the same tone as “That’s my boyfriend!”
May be I am just a little zany; but as a teacher, I will be
honoured if any day, if a student comes across my handwriting in the pages and
recognises it as part of a painstaking but rewarding procedure of preparation
for classes and feels the same way as I felt when I had seen those writings,
numberings and markings against the margins made in a familiar hand. For
someone, whose heaven is a library, whose dreams include having a coffee
counter inside the library; finding a new book to read is a pleasure but
reading a well-thumbed and annotated one is an even more enjoyable experience.
When I was a teenager, I had read this story named
“An Evening in Grand Central”, in which a man falls in love with a woman just from
the comments that she had written in a book that he comes across. The book is a
second hand copy of Somerset Maugham’s
Of
Human Bondage and when they decide to meet she tells him that she will wear
a red rose on her lapel. On the day of the meeting, he comes across an old
woman wearing a red rose while a beautiful girl in a green dress walks by like “the
springtime come alive”. But he decides to talk to the lady only to find that
his love is none other than the girl in green dress and that she is waiting for
him in a restaurant across the road. May be she was too shy to meet him in
person, God knows!
