As an avid reader who wishes she could curl up with a book
for the whole day and call it a career, books are the third ‘b’ in my
dictionary, after bed and breakfast. I was drawn to books as a four year old (a
legacy I have passed down to my kid) and fortunately, that habit has only grown
with time. Books changed my life. They drew me in in a way no person has and
has made me the person I am. Even before I understood the word ‘passion’, I was
snatching and stealing moments away from my classroom as an eight grader to
sneak in to the hall downstairs which housed a single, rickety, wooden cupboard
with books of all kinds. It was my school’s definition of a library (mine was a
humble missionary school after all) and yet, the treasures in it had me
drooling for hours. Suffice it to say that by the time I had passed out, there
was not a single popular title I hadn’t read. My idea of a brilliant birthday
gift was a box full of books and a library subscription. My first whiff of a
library was the one in my college at St.Xavier’s and what an Alibaba’s cave it
was! Often photographed and shot in as a spectacular heritage library in
numerous films, ads and songs, the St.Xavier’s library is grand, ornate with
its Gothic façade and construction, (it’s all stone and wood), and has that
whiff of old, worn books fingered and handled by lakhs of students, year after
year. From a library dedicated to purely reference books for study and course-related
research, it also has a smaller area dealing entirely in the realm of fiction
literature and this was usually where I was caught in my break time, borrowing,
browsing, reading or just getting lost in the melee of literary magic around
me, as I walked through every aisle.
It propelled me to take up a course in
English Literature which further urged me to take up two more memberships- at
the British Council and American Library in South Mumbai. Excuse me though, I
was no nerd and soon the glamourous world of the media gave me little mindspace
or time to even browse through bookstands, forget actually read. It didn’t stop
me however, from building my own book case in my room stacked with gifts,
hand-me-downs from childhood and purchased books to make up my own personal
collection of literary gems- you will find everything here from a Linda Goodman’s
Love Signs to Evelyn Waugh, JRR Tolkein and chick lit. It means I can wake up
to the glorious sight of books whenever I am in Mumbai and that is enough to
make my day. I know I am a bit crazy, one of the highlights of my life has been
going for the Jaipur Literary Festival when I was three months pregnant just so
I could tick it off my bucket list.
It was only after a colleague mentioned that there were
online libraries these days where for a minimal subscription, I could order
online and read books at my own pace, that I discovered how technology had
indeed made being a bibliophile easier! So librarywala.com in Mumbai and
friendsofbooks.com and libraryathome.com when in Delhi have ensured I always
had a surplus quota of books to feed my reader’s lust. When I was moving to
Canberra then, apart from letting go of a lot many other things, and one that I
delayed till the end was ending my library subscription in Delhi. My constant
worry among other things foreign, when settling in another land was how was I going
to fill the need for books in my life here? Thankfully, my generous
brother-in-law’s Bayside library card and my loving sister’s assurances of
everything being taken care of got me through the welcoming doors of the fully
automated, and friendly interiors of Rockdale Library in Sydney. With a
humongous floor dedicated to literary fiction, and a kids’ area where they can
lose themselves in a bookish wonderland of sorts, I could not have asked for
more. So of course my whole family is now enrolled as members of the library,
memberships to Government libraries being free in Australia with the added bonus
of picking up your monthly supply of films, music, audio books, non-fiction,
newspapers, journals, magazines and even internet time. Kids even get regular
invites to storytelling time in multiple languages which I believe is the best
way to initiate them in to reading and developing an awareness about different
languages in the world.
The natural next step was to find my way to an ACT library after
coming to Canberra and my need was answered in the form of the Woden Heritage
Library. Now all I have to do is hop in to a bus and get there in 10 minutes,
to leave my kid free to browse the kiddie section while I do my own book-hopping.
One should be thankful for all the pleasant surprises God
springs our way and to my utter delight, a resident in my suburb has
meticulously used the bark of a tree stump to put up his own home-grown library
with titles that I have not come across. I recently picked up Kate Forsyth’s
The Wild Girl, unable to resist temptation a few days after seeing the book
lined up. It was a wonderful read based on the real foundations of the Grimm’s
fairytales. It imagines how they all came to be, woven together by the Grimm
brothers- Jakob and Wilhem against the backdrop of the Napoleanic war-ravaged German
kingdom of Hesse-Cassel and a moving love story between Wilhem and Dortchen
Wild, his neighbour who contributes the best of these fairytales through
recitation. For trivia lovers, The Wild Girl was named The Most Memorable Love
Story by Australian readers in 2013. Now that I have read the book, I can
understand why.
I cannot thank the gentleman or lady who has put up this mini-public
library for opening up a new possibility of reading for avaricious readers like
me who are always hungry for more. Back in Delhi, I read about how volunteers
were placing books at visible corners at metro stations where people can read,
return and exchange books whenever they can. Gestures like this bind a
community of like-minded readers to make the world a better place, one book at
a time. Another reason to be thankful
these days is the cosy Community Library Nook with a book share system at the
shopping centre in my neighbourhood. Now what more could I ask for?
