Bookless in Bombay
I think I might have to change cities. Move somewhere else. Someplace that has a decent library. A library that is still present in the physical world and has not moved off into that other, ether, virtual world.
A month or so ago, when when I went to return my latest (and what was to be my last) consignment of books — a beautiful gem of a book of short stories on food by Jim Crace, Hilary Mantel’s first book and Anne Fine’s Raking the Ashes (dark and humourous) the shelves at the British Council Library in Mumbai were all closed off to the public (and were being mercilessly emptied by staff) while members lingered over tables in the centre piled high with withdrawn books put up for sale. Deep in my heart I felt terrible — it was like making the most of someone’s misfortune, or like vultures picking at the remains of something beautiful and alive that is now dead.
The library often withdraws books and puts them on sale but this was different. And yet there I was, going through it all, not once, not twice but thrice to see what I wanted to take from it all. What kind of books come to bear the withdrawn stamp? Is it that they have too many copies of the title? Or is it that no one reads them anymore? It’s the same story at bookstore sales too, where books that normally cost Rs 640 are suddenly marked down to Rs 80. Why? The bad books I don’t care about but the authors I like? I feel a need to ‘rescue’ the books from a callous world that does not realise their potential. Which is how I have two copies of The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, one bought from the trestle tables on London’s south bank for five pounds, the other from a Crossword sale for Rs 60 or so.
That’s also how every Beryl Bainbridge went into my shopping pile. With a name like that I would pick up her books blindly. Okay, maybe not. Maybe it had more to do with the one book I had read of hers — The Bottle Factory Outing — and her humour immediately won me over. But it’s one of life’s mysteries — how can anyone not want her? And yet I felt bad that all the gardening books, if there were any, had been cleaned out.
So now, without a proper library (no, an online version is NOT the same and besides, this is the year of more real, less virtual for me, how can anyone expect me to spend more hours browsing the web?!) how will I know which books to buy and which to well leave alone? And there are so many stages of my life left — where will a pedant like me go when I need books on pregnancy and on parenting? Though there are no siblings on the horizon for my nephew I had to pick up a Horrid Henry book where he is nasty to the new baby — who knows if I’ll find it when I need it? Tom Stoppard’s plays were surely better off on the BCL’s shelves than mine but who knows when I’ll want to pick him up or Bertrand Russell again?
Books are destiny disguised as chance encounters, they turn up and tell you to pick them up when you are in need. How else would you account for, fittingly, a book called Library: An Unquiet History that my eyes fell on among the piles on my second round? Written by a Harvard librarian, it says on the first page, “When I first went to work in Harvard’s Widener Library, I immediately made my first mistake: I tried to read the books.” He goes on to quote Thomas Wolfe in Of Time and the River: “The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.”
For one fleeting moment, I thought yes, maybe it was okay not to have a library because of the feeling of being completely illiterate that it all gave you. Just a fleeting moment. But really, I would rather know there are other books waiting for me. Available in all their page-turning glory when I want them, need them. I will have to find another city.
I think I might have to change cities. Move somewhere else. Someplace that has a decent library. A library that is still present in the physical world and has not moved off into that other, ether, virtual world.
A month or so ago, when when I went to return my latest (and what was to be my last) consignment of books — a beautiful gem of a book of short stories on food by Jim Crace, Hilary Mantel’s first book and Anne Fine’s Raking the Ashes (dark and humourous) the shelves at the British Council Library in Mumbai were all closed off to the public (and were being mercilessly emptied by staff) while members lingered over tables in the centre piled high with withdrawn books put up for sale. Deep in my heart I felt terrible — it was like making the most of someone’s misfortune, or like vultures picking at the remains of something beautiful and alive that is now dead.
The library often withdraws books and puts them on sale but this was different. And yet there I was, going through it all, not once, not twice but thrice to see what I wanted to take from it all. What kind of books come to bear the withdrawn stamp? Is it that they have too many copies of the title? Or is it that no one reads them anymore? It’s the same story at bookstore sales too, where books that normally cost Rs 640 are suddenly marked down to Rs 80. Why? The bad books I don’t care about but the authors I like? I feel a need to ‘rescue’ the books from a callous world that does not realise their potential. Which is how I have two copies of The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, one bought from the trestle tables on London’s south bank for five pounds, the other from a Crossword sale for Rs 60 or so.
That’s also how every Beryl Bainbridge went into my shopping pile. With a name like that I would pick up her books blindly. Okay, maybe not. Maybe it had more to do with the one book I had read of hers — The Bottle Factory Outing — and her humour immediately won me over. But it’s one of life’s mysteries — how can anyone not want her? And yet I felt bad that all the gardening books, if there were any, had been cleaned out.
So now, without a proper library (no, an online version is NOT the same and besides, this is the year of more real, less virtual for me, how can anyone expect me to spend more hours browsing the web?!) how will I know which books to buy and which to well leave alone? And there are so many stages of my life left — where will a pedant like me go when I need books on pregnancy and on parenting? Though there are no siblings on the horizon for my nephew I had to pick up a Horrid Henry book where he is nasty to the new baby — who knows if I’ll find it when I need it? Tom Stoppard’s plays were surely better off on the BCL’s shelves than mine but who knows when I’ll want to pick him up or Bertrand Russell again?
Books are destiny disguised as chance encounters, they turn up and tell you to pick them up when you are in need. How else would you account for, fittingly, a book called Library: An Unquiet History that my eyes fell on among the piles on my second round? Written by a Harvard librarian, it says on the first page, “When I first went to work in Harvard’s Widener Library, I immediately made my first mistake: I tried to read the books.” He goes on to quote Thomas Wolfe in Of Time and the River: “The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.”
For one fleeting moment, I thought yes, maybe it was okay not to have a library because of the feeling of being completely illiterate that it all gave you. Just a fleeting moment. But really, I would rather know there are other books waiting for me. Available in all their page-turning glory when I want them, need them. I will have to find another city.
posted by Monica at 5:42 AM
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