Renovated old worlds

Today, a conversation on twitter led me to stumble upon this. A hole in the wall childhood wonderland has turned into an e-beast. 10 branches, e-catalogues, door delivery- I wanted to cry! It felt like a personal secret garden had been invaded, trampled upon and converted in to a huge concrete jungle. 

The scraps to riches story is really inspiring, impressive and something I am proud to say I saw happening and I would have definitely felt a million times worse if the library had gone to dust. But the transition of an old, charming world of nooks and corners stuffed with shelves of books, the cool dampness in the inside rooms, the wonderfully enticing smell of books and paper, the grumpy old men with ledgers and the thrills of search, stumble and discovery  set my huzun quotient dial to maximum.

My dad’s generation saw their contributions to Palani’s dream of starting a library out of an old-paper business turn into a tiny cubby filled with shelves heaving under the weight of books. My mom saw her library membership become the most coveted possession for many in the house. B900, it wasn’t just any number. It was a pass code into a luxurious world of the published wonders. But it was also a number, thanks to my dad mostly, tagged with a lot of late returns and fines

A trip to the library, though it was only 5min walk from home, was an event for me!  I would accompany my mother, armed with the  “library bag”, with a vague list in head. 2-3 books for me,2 books for Kindu, book or two for Amma and then an allotted quota of comics. I don’t know why, maybe because of the chill of the steel, maybe because of the dampness of the books, or even because of the hot sun in the short walk there, but entering the library  always felt like entering a cool dark cave. The library was always dimly lit, some of the inside rooms didn’t even have sunlight hit them. It was a labyrinth where if you knew your way around there was no stopping you from finding treasures. There was no formal cataloguing, a vague sorting by genres and alphabetical listing. New hardbounds in the front next to rows and rows of DOS guides , the classics in the middle room, the banned shelves of M&Bs and anything else my mom deemed as trash, the barely visited(much to my regret now) tamil shelves, the rows of Just William books, the entire collection of Hardy boys and Nancy Drews, Enid Blytons, Roal Dahls- there was never a book I couldn’t find at Easwari, or at least that Palani couldn’t help me find.  My mom was unfortunately an indulgently black-marked regular. Palani would always throw a mock fuss before he gave out a new book to my mother. But secretly I think those were just roles we played, to keep the proceedings interesting.

Grumpy men with grunt filled vocabulary sat to enter the books into huge ledgers for check out, of course not before diligently checking  the returned books. You just had to give them the membership number. No IDs, no verification. The trade was built on a trust system. There were no cards in the book, just an oval purple rubber stamp to show that it was the property of Easwari. Regulars could get away occasionally by saying that things would be returned later.  In the end,Palani always decided the bill. His was a supremely unique method, with a strange algorithm in his head, I’m sure ,with weightage for his fondness of the customer, his mood and probably the taste of his lunch! He would lift each book, and almost sort of weigh it with his wrist before throwing it down with a thud. No word, no eye contact and at the end of the whole process, he would pronounce a number that we couldn’t refute. But dues and account balances were tolerated, again, with vague grunts. And finally,walking out of the library with a pile of books waiting to be read was one of the greatest thrills in life.

As I grew older, my mom would be the one making the trips to the library with lists from everyone in the family. Later in life, perippa even got an account to Eloor  Library that was spic and span and organized to the T. It lacked the warmth and charm of a neighbourhood library, and was also so impersonal. No Palani to admonish you, or give you a scolding or tell you that you should read Ponniyin Selvan in Tamil.

These days, while I have forgotten the charms of a cozy library and have moved on to second hands and e-books, my mom still visits Easwari almost every month. She tells me Palani still sits there, and he still refuses to give her first dibs at new books. But the library is more organized, more efficient and computers sit where the ledgers once did (that was even in my time). While my father’s generation saw  the crumbling of a lot of their charmed worlds with the change of times (Safire theatre, more recently Drive-in), it is the turn of mine to see the renovation of rabbit holes, into castles with elevators. Unfortunately efficiency and enterprise is always at the price of romantic  old-world charm!

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