In 1998, when I first came to Delhi for my Master’s in international studies, one of the first things I did was take membership of the American Center Library (ACL) and the British Council Library (BCL). Because it was incredibly hot, and we only had ceiling fans in the hostel, we called ACL the “air-conditioned library”, and because that is as far as our sense of humour stretched, BCL was the “bear-conditioned library”.

Since the hostel rooms were limited — a problem that continues to plague India’s public universities today — I ended up waiting for the second list of room allotments. In the meanwhile I bunked over with a friend. There was no real room to study — barely enough to sleep, to be honest — so I ended up with a pile of books in the cafeteria, reading away.

It was only many months later that some classmates told me how much it freaked them out that I was reading for the sake of learning. They were there to get a degree, maybe to prepare for the civil service exams, and land a job. Learning anything was entirely incidental to the process.

For me, though, books were freedom. I had spent three years getting a degree at a Hindi-medium college where — when I finished the course — the guy handing out the final mark sheet said, “Three years? What was the hurry?” A number of my classmates had managed to get jobs, but mostly as support staff to the many wannabe mafia dons who survived off the railway contracts business in Gorakhpur, my hometown. This was the downside of Gorakhpur being one of the largest railway hubs in India. The upside was the library, where I could escape into other worlds. My poor college had only a few dozen books in its library — all study material, nothing to feed hopes or dreams, merely rote learning that would make you end up hating books even if you were inclined to like them.

In Delhi, ACL and BCL were dreamlike in terms of what they offered. As a child I had attended schools with well-stocked libraries. It had allowed a non-native English speaker like me to catch up and then surpass my classmates for whom it was the first language. In a sense, then, libraries had been my allies and friends at times when I had few, or none, and so it was good to have access to them.

The thing is that ACL and BCL are paid libraries. You can go to Teen Murti and consult the books, and there are other academic libraries here or there, but they are generally for the better-off. In 2006, I experienced a different set of libraries — in London, where I spent a year after having finished my first novel, researching a book I still have to write, and broke, living off loans and the kindness of friends and family. During that time, especially when a job opportunity had slipped through my fingers, or I had bad news from a publisher, I frequented public libraries in different parts of the city.

The Westminster Reference Library, behind the National Gallery of Art in central London, tended to be inhabited by an odd assortment of people. Quite often a homeless person would wander in and spend time, the layers of clothing cloaking him (almost always a man) in an aura of indescribable smells. I still associate the smell of the homeless with that library, and that smell is intertwined in the plot lines of the books I discovered and read there.

In Sutton, Surrey, the library was new and beautiful. It was there that I read the works of Neal Stephenson, grand cyberpunk novels, and his The Baroque Cycle , which tells an alternative history of the rise of computing in the world. In Lambeth Libraries, off Clapham, I discovered a biography called The Orientalist , of the novelist Lev Nussimbaum, also known as Essad Bey and Kurban Said, a writer who managed to escape Stalin, but not the Nazis and the Fascists.

In India, I often wonder, if I were broke, looking for a job, researching a book, which free libraries would nurture me? Could I freely consume knowledge, could I refresh myself from the stories — both true and fantastical — that the world had, or would I be left with no real options? I fear the latter. I was lucky. I consumed literature, and used that to write books of my own. I wonder how many writers we lose because we do not have similar libraries to sustain them.

Related Topics