A Life in Libraries
Ajit Chaudhuri – May 2022
“It’s only words, and words are all I have, to take
your heart away!”
I love libraries!! They are great
places to mis-spend life in; offering solitude and quiet in a world in which
these are increasingly becoming luxuries, and enabling the possibility of
whiling away significant swathes of time in peace without the threat of
eviction if you haven’t bought coffee or whatever. And (and this is a closely
held secret), a fair sprinkling of the women you find within can be classified
as glamorous (often in an understated way), and most of this number are
intelligent, and that’s a heady combination even though, it has to be said,
such women by definition have better things to do than reciprocate the interests
of the likes of me.
The first library I remember was
at my boarding school – a refuge in the otherwise cold and miserable place with
a culture of bullying into which a small and meek kid could lose himself in a
world of books. We had two library classes a week and could also borrow books
and read them after dinner, and I devoured as many as I could in the 5 years I
was there, coming away with one of two things that I am grateful to the school
for – a need to have something to read with me, irrespective of genre, title, author
and others’ opinions. Many journeys into unremarkable places in a life spent wandering
around were survived thanks to the bag full of books I always carried.
College life was different – the
action would migrate from the canteen to the library around end-January every
year (exams were in April), with all us lechers and loafers following suit. It
was the first time in the academic year that we would notice the studious
girls, referred to as behanjis, and assess their potential. On one
occasion, a girl got up from her table to drink water or whatever and we put a
note in the next page of the open book that she was studying that read ‘if you
want to you-know-what, raise your left hand; if you don’t, raise your right
hand’. She came back, studied the page she was on, turned the page, read the
note, and then did a glaring 360-degree look-around. None of us had the guts to
raise our eyes from our books for the next ten minutes. On another, a friend of
mine (now a respectably retired banker) procured truck-wallah-type kachha
underpants for himself and someone bet him five bucks to do a tour of the
library in them. Such was the value of money at the time that we both went to
see a film on the proceeds, to-and-fro bus fares included.
I don’t remember my management institute’s
library very well as a Masters’ student in the late 1980s, except for a
basement that housed a computer (a VAX-VMS, for the pros among you, which was
state of the art at the time) that I was among the few who could program. When
I returned to the institute in 2011 for doctoral studies, I used the library extensively
for hanging around, research and writing, and several academic papers emanate
from that time. I also dealt with knowing that I would not complete my PhD – I
was stone broke, and a forced return to the salt mines was imminent – by
putting my research into a fictional setting; three months of writing sans
distraction for ten hours a day, resulting in my first novel, “Pax Feminica”.
Another library that I remember
well was the one at the LSE, where I underwent a mid-career course in leadership
in 2001 – a large, glitzy place with a humongous collection of reading material;
you just went to the librarian with what you wanted, and you were pointed
towards it (and if it wasn’t available, the library was committed to obtaining
it for you within 3 days). It even had a copy of the cult classic “Nomads and
the Outside World”, Khazanov’s ethnographic description of pastoral nomadism in
Soviet central Asia, that I had been looking for for years. It was only later, during
a visit to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, that I questioned the value of such
an approach – the Bodleian, believing that ‘what you want is likely to be
somewhere near what you are looking for’, encouraged you to hang around and browse.
The last library on my list did
not belong to a fancy institution, was not housed in a gigantic building, and
did not have library staff – it was discovered while visiting a friend’s
ancestral home in a village in coastal Karnataka (specifically Kukkila, South
Canara district, near the town of Vittla) in 1991. The red-tiled bungalow in
the middle of a mid-sized cashew plantation had a set of stairs leading
somewhere, and I was informed upon enquiry that there was an attic upstairs that
housed a library. Wow! I spent the remainder of my stay ensconced within, emerging
only at mealtimes to sample his mother’s wonderful Canarese cooking when its
whiff drifted upwards. ‘That’s what I want in life,’ I remember thinking at the
time, ‘in addition to owning a football club that plays in the Champions League
and to be an object of desire for an entire Miss World competition’s contingent
– to have a dedicated space in my house for books, which I could retreat into for
a little peace and quiet when I required it.’
My thinking on the professed
ambitions has changed a bit in the thirty plus years that have passed, well, at
least on the last one. I now want it to be something for myself and for local
children from disadvantaged backgrounds – a safe and quiet space with lots of
books, magazines and periodicals for them to read, where they can also do their
homework and generally pass time. It was therefore with some distress that I gave
away a significant proportion of my book collection while shifting home earlier
this year, a collection dedicatedly developed via purchases, gifts and, last
but not least, a policy of borrowing and not returning. Despite this, my
library continues to be the only one of my professed ambitions with a realistic
chance of being realized.
