“The world was hers for the reading.”
― Betty Smith,
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I used to read classics - the Bronte sisters, Jack London, Mark Twain, Stevenson and Dickens.
I used to read Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, Enid Blyton and Lucy Maud Montgomery.
I used to read about cricket and baseball matches from old books, of yellow creased pages and hard-bound covers.
You had to be careful about them- they were fragile, old beings, signs of their well-spent lives evident on their lineaments.
The books used to smell of all the old fingers that turned the pages around, all the old minds that owned the book for days, only to return it to where it rightfully belonged
-- the childhood library.
The library with that musty, welcoming smell - book-lovers are familiar with, some like me are addicted to.
There were Classics - old books in older covers- blue bound.
The borders had the title scribbled on a piece of paper, yellowish - pasted - crayons brushed lightly over the name tag to denote the genre they represented.
Red for Classics, green for Sports, blue for Science and purple for Biographies.
Books on quizzes too - yellow for them.
The door to the clustered, damp room that was the library, opened with a rusty, round key from a bunch of old keys.
You turn the key, the lock clicks.
And then the smell, that smell hits you,
before light enters into the dark corners of the cluttered room.
The smell of thousand lives alive and breathing on the bookshelves.
The gente thunping of the heart inside a heaving chest as you strain your arches and tiptoe, inching forward into the semi-darkness.
The curtains heavily breath, in and out, like some wild, unyielding beast, watching.
You lunge forward, digging your hands into a shelf of old hardcovers, and run your fingers along the half-tattered spine of ancient books.
Your nostrils twitch at the odour of wilted paper and words in fountain ink crawling across them.
Towering almirahs and shelves (cupboards, really) of overwhelming height and stature (overwhelming for a mere 7-years old, wide-eyed, and tiptoeing enthusiast) greet the occasional visit and embrace her with arms of inadvertently seeping rays of sun.
You stop running your probing fingers and pull out a book, scanning through the hardly legible scrawls in red and blue, bending over the pages, now and then, to smell them absent-mindedly - almost a custom with you.
You drum your fingers along the spine while you check the faded illustration inside the hard cover.
You set it down on the round tea-table, across the window, flanked by a lone chiar.
You turn back to the other shelves.
Through the cracked glass you try to peep inside and read the titles of books from their dusty yellow tags.
You pull out one red, one green.
You walk back to the lone chair, waiting for an occupant since you left, eight years ago.
Sitting down, you open the red tagged book.
-- Jane Eyre
and then the green
-- In Lane Three, Alex Archer
Your life recedes from your present, fades out of focus.
Your life reduces to a point on the chair.
You live on, in the robes of Eyre,
and spandex suits of Alex.
You live lifetimes in hours, inhabit a thousand lives at once.
Meanwhile,
the real world leaves your station, a train merely passing you by, as you sit by the window looking out and waving.
You smile.
You smile.
As you watch out
the window that opens to
the unseen, unknown, unimagined.
You live lifetimes.
Through Eyre and Archer.
Almost through with the last pages,
You hear a knock.
A woman enters.
Looks curiously at you.
"Who are you?"
You smile.
Hand her the red and the green tagged books.
And walk outside.
You do have a train to catch, right?
Epilogue:
But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.
(Alberto Manguel,
The Library at Night)
[This is strictly an account from whatever's left of this incident in my memory.
I hope I was not a bore.
Or got too overbearing. ]
