During an idle afternoon on a recent trip to Trivandrum, I visited the State Central Library. Inside the stately Gothic building, a uniformed official was looking into a register on his desk. I approached him and asked where I could find the English collection.
He did not understand English. Malayalam was a tongue I understood but struggled to speak. I tried Tamil – not my mother tongue, Kannada, but closer to his language – and it worked. To gain access as a visitor I had to fill out a form and get it signed by the “duty librarian”. The form was in Malayalam, and he pointed to the spots where I had to fill in my name, address, and purpose of visit. “Visiting,” I wrote.
The duty librarian was a young woman seated behind a desk in a wooden cubicle. There was no one else around, so I walked up to her and handed the form. At the bottom of the page she wrote “Permitted to visit library,” signed below, and added the date. I asked her about the sections in the library. After giving me a broad outline of the building, she directed me to where I could find books in English.
I spent two hours in the tube lighted hall stacked with books in English, sitting at a large wooden desk under a ceiling fan, reading through snippets of books I picked from shelves with labels that interest me these days. One of the labels read, “The social problems of and services to groups of people”.
The library was empty and silent. Occasionally one or two young women would pass by. Another librarian, a middle-aged woman in a salwar kameez, sat nearby cataloging a stack of books. After a while she left and another woman took her place.
When I left the building, I felt a mixture of elation, loss and disquiet. Such spaces are a gift, but we can no longer take them for granted. I thought about the library in Heidelberg that was a 5 minute walk from our home in that city; I thought about banned books no longer available in libraries in the US; and I thought of a photo essay I’d read recently, with text by Jerry Pinto that ended with these words:
“That edifice which looks so imposing, those rows of books which look so welcoming, they are as susceptible to the passage of time as you are. Time ravages books just as much as silverfish, mildew and blades wielded in secret and in silence.
The book has many enemies. So have libraries. But the worst enemy of all is the sound of receding footsteps, as people walk away from libraries.
Tell me, when did you last go to the library?”
Parmanu 