Love in the library

After the controversy at Aligarh Muslim University over banning girls’ entry into a library, we must accept libraries for what they really are: not the nerdy dens as the general belief goes, but crucibles of silent, consuming love. I am not talking of the novels where prim and stuffy librarians melt into lava in the arms of bibliomaniac hunks, or of maladroit undergrads looking to make out in the stacks, under the watchful eyes of compendiums and encyclopaedias. Love in the library isn’t the quick, spicy variety like love in the kitchen, on the dining table or, if you like, on the stairs. The library romance proposes an entire philosophy of love.

“Every other night, on TV,” writes Roland Barthes in his A Lover’s Discourse , “someone says: I love you.” In the age of loquacity, love finds little means to rise above banality. The romantic love, as it has been practised since the middle ages, thrives on the myth of its own originality. Every lover strives to find his own language of love since he feels his is a unique feeling. Or at least he wants to own the public language of love by stamping it with his own seal, even if it’s scribbling ‘I-love-you’ on a Hallmark card in a cursive hand where letters cuddle up together in anticipation of the first union. In the library, you cannot say so much as, “Let’s go out for coffee” let alone the banal declarative Barthes heard on TV every night. The library is a controlled space of bureaucratic discipline and mathematical order. By muting all communication, it amplifies the lovers’ silent sign system. In the library, they are forced to invent their private language. The library promotes the gesture, the signal and the innuendo, essentially the language of romance. Like a book, the lovers are open, recto and verso, to each other. And one has to read the other like one reads the book. A sideways glance, a stray foot, a hand that rises and rests on the forehead have so much to tell unlike in the noisy outside world where they appear blank. A routine gesture of the lover can get stuck like a bookmark in the mind and create a reference for whatever follows in the day. Therefore, like the readers that they are, the lovers live forever in interpretation. Much like the textual exegesis, romantic love is a constant search for meaning. It is an interpretive enterprise.

The library routine is replete with the accidental due to an excessive emphasis on decorum and control. A brush that would go unnoticed outside and won’t even require saying sorry, gets dramatised inside a library. Old Hindi films extracted much out of the stock situation. The hero and heroine would bump into each other, drop their books and bend down to pick them up. In the process, they would make contact and immediately recoil in embarrassment. A tiny routine incident seems an accident of fate that brings them together and looms over them forever.

One of the important conventions of romantic love, fate lurks at every corner of the library, trying to turn routine brushes into ineluctable love. Enveloped in silence, its day progressing in slow motion and time lapsing with the turning of the pages, the library can highlight even small incidents and fill them with extraordinary meaning. It can make a chance encounter look like a fated meeting, and a sudden crossing of paths a convincing omen. Long after they bumped into each other in the library, the lovers would keep revisiting that fateful moment. Had it been in the market, they won’t even have looked at each other twice.

The clandestine language of love that helps lovers create and define their personal world is more easily achieved in the library because it offers them a microcosm of a mock-hostile world. The speech is taboo and the movement is restricted. Like their medieval counterparts, they can easily feel that the world is a big conspiracy against them. Even a small kind word uttered softly can raise eyebrows. The Dewey Decimal System of classification hangs over them in surveillance, as if the dour librarian is cataloguing even their tiniest interactions. With furtive glances, they express solidarity against the malevolent civilisational order of the library that quells all romance. In the outside world, they are just two guys no one would perhaps even bother to notice.

Love in the library is an academic exercise for it must create an excess of meaning around the signs. It must read and be read in the way of a book.

Reading in itself is an erotic art. Right from an appreciative caress of the spine of a book to the orgasmic discovery of meaning. Most novels imitate the structure of love-making: the exposition, the rising action, the climax and the exhaustion that lays your mind to rest. Maybe that’s why painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir could imbue his reading women, intently focused on books, looking quite domestic otherwise, with the sensuousness of the Renaissance nudes. The reader-lover understands the desire that unfolds like page after page of a tome, the silent passion that burns discreetly behind the soda-bottle glasses of a studious undergrad, and the heady smell of dying books that tickles the nostrils during stolen moments of intimacy in the stacks.

(Dharminder Kumar is a Delhi-based journalist)