Memory has a way of eddying around certain points. For me, a person who spent half his life with books, a library will be a place that brings back a lot of memories. Today, I visited, for the first time, the new addition to the Public library: the stack of books left over from the erstwhile British library. To see all those books, most of them so familiar to my hand and eyes, after such a long time... I was overwhelmed. I remember the last time I visited the British library( Britain i used to call it). It was the penultimate day of its existence.The deserted look, sans people, the sorrowing staff...And today i beheld the dead collection.
I remember my visits to the library, in evenings on weekdays, straight from school. The bus to Statue, the tea and vazhakka appam,sometimes parippuvada from the thattu kada around the State Bank corner. The shuttling between the Public and British libraries. Again parippuvada,this time from the thattukada on wheels near Connemara market, run by the blank man and the talkative lady. Take my word, that was the best parippuvada in Trivandrum-ever. Sleepy, rainy Trivandrum with traffic snarls on the thin roads and the never ending road widening and cable laying work. Days that I went back home with as much as ten books in my bag. And what all books! Physics, physiology, psychology, bacteriology, math, art, literature, poetry,novels, stories... Those were the days when i discovered Orwell and Auden, saw the rainforests with Attenborough, ruminated on Darwin with Jay Gould, laughed with Spike Milligan and almost died with Keats. Not to mention Tolkien and Rowling, Penrose and Kipling, John and Mary Gribbin, Roy and Mc Cully, Gibran and Mc Ewan, Ray and William S(guess who?).
The British Library was also the research base, where, alongwith my friend Chacko, I studied the feasibility of making electricity from cowdung using a thermocouple(cowdung being warm, and since thermocouple+warmth = current). It was the craziest idea I ever had, and of course it didn't work out because, as we realized a few years down the line, we were trying to contravene the hallowed Second Law of Thermodynamics. But we tried nevertheless, reading up a lot on bacteria and cows in the process.(how I miss those crazy days. Nowadays it's impossible to be crazy because you have to play the part of a sensible grownup. Given a choice, i'd rather be crazy than grownup, anyday.)
Today i brought back two books, just for the sake of it. But now when I open them i get a whiff, a faint smell that takes me back to that little library with dusted carpets and cool interiors. A love affair that started when i was fourteen and went on for, what, six, seven years? Now, ten years have gone by since that first day and things seem to have come full circle. I still remember the first book i took- Life of Johnson by Boswell. Not my choice, just my father trying to inculcate an interest in the classics. And to please him what did I not gulp down? Four volumes of A History of the English speaking peoples by Churchill, no less!
In a sense the death of the library did me some good. I went deeper into the public library, giving it my undivided attention for the first time, and i had some exceptional reading experiences. In a sense it was my maturing as a reader. In terms of classic fiction, Public_sans( as i called it) was a mammoth. But for technical and scientific books, for new editions, or for the pleasure of simply sitting and reading, in soft cushioned chairs and in a silent ambience-for that Britain had no equal. I miss the AC, the books that always sat where they were supposed to, the helpful staff and the scent of the place. The building still stands: they call it the YMCA auditorium. Any fool can walk in and tell at once that it was not a place made to be an auditorium, but a house of books. But what's the point? Things must change, and always for the worse.
I hate the Second Law.
