One day you chance upon one dust-lined first page inscribed with a sweet-smelling dedication reminding you that someone kept these books close to their heart. On other occasions, the inscriptions are not so kind. Read this only if you consider yourself a genius, they warn you. Issue cards filled with entries from other eras, 1978, 1991, 2002, all tell you that these riches have belonged to other people too. Decades have passed and these friends have stayed to help all the queasy students navigate the coming years with some wisdom from their place on the walls. Indeed, books have been loyal friends since even before their pages began to be made of paper.
Ashurbanipal, the last of the great kings of the Assyrian empire stayed at home and built a library for himself, much like bibliophiles like us would have done in this pandemic. His father believed that the wisdom these pages (in this case, made of clay tablets) have to offer, will help Ashurbanipal run the empire better. He happily took the advice and we are fortunate enough that his library was found during excavations at Nineveh. It is now displayed at the British Museum.
Libraries were famous even in the medieval worlds, albeit their purposes have changed. Earlier, they were a sign of luxury, few nobles who had space and money dedicated rooms to just books. However, its importance was not diminished. The magnificent Mughals took much pride in their Kitaabkhana. Their libraries housed books bequeathed to them by their ancestors from the Timurid heartland, and they borrowed illustrated manuals from the Persianate world. They quite enjoyed having these books, adding their imperial seals to the front page and boasted about having read the books which made them an ideal king - king of the pens, as they were kings of the sword.
One wonders about the reading tastes of these kings of the past. Did they lean towards classics or enjoyed a few fresh writers? Perhaps, they stuck to what they knew best, military and administrative guides like Kautilya’s Arthashastra or Plato’s Republic. You think of all these random questions as you borrow books and find your favorites navigating the shelves of this university library of yours.
You spend some more time in this library, sometimes with a friend, trying to chew popcorn and avoid the glares of your fellow readers and sometimes alone, trying to find a cozy spot near the radiator in the dry winters to sip your tea or to feel the cool breeze from the slightly opened windows in the stuffy rains. You dread moving from the noisy entrance to the top level, so quiet that everyone stares when you step out from the creaky lift, as though you are an alien coming to disturb the calm of the earth. But slowly, you get used to all the glares and the sounds. You become a regular visitor, you develop your “library times”, quite a useful euphemism for “me time”; you find the most comfortable desk with enough space to scatter all your notes and the perfect floor with the right amount of quiet.
Slowly and steadily, as the pleasant fall weather gives way to dreary winter days, you find yourself here in between classes, finding that reference you need for your unfinished paper, in the winter breaks when your friends go back home and eventually staying in the warm seats till the guards remind you that it is time for the gates to be closed and the day to end.
Wandering around the library aisles is an experience in itself. On some occasions, you feel determined, power walking to the shelf to pick up the single treasured copy of a book before someone else gets their hand on it. You reach home feeling accomplished feeling in control of your destiny. On other days, you feel guilty, having had an argument with your parents for speaking too loudly on the phone when you were in the no talking zone. But the best days are the ones where you just stroll around, scanning shelves lazily till a title sounds intriguing or the spine of a book stands out from its companions on the shelves. The book seems to be calling out to you, “Pick me”, I am fun, and you fall in the trap. You had planned which book to read when, first should be the one which is to be returned the earliest or the one you need to work on for your next class, but you invariably find yourself picking this most charming one and reading it by your room’s window.
The dim-lit corners of the library evoke a sense of unfamiliarity with their numerous pages that you have never read and will probably never read. But you find your own place of refuge, perhaps in a shelf whose titles you know by heart. You don’t need to find its accession number and its class marks, was it J or JA or J with doubles A’s perhaps? You just need to spot the cobalt blue edges of that biography, well bound and fresh, or the washed green spine of that old volume, joined with specks of threads, to know you are in that same place where you feel comforted. This corner becomes your own. When you are nervous, not sure if you are ready to meet the friend you lost touch with or to face the class for your presentation, you can sit in that corner, reading the covers and introductions you have read numerous times just one more time to forget what worries haunt your day.
Libraries are where some of your warmest memories were made. It is where you sit with your friends thinking you will push each other to finish that reading, only to see the blessed 20 minutes between classes fly by. It is where you have gotten lost in the aisles trying to locate that one book you desperately need, realizing a little too late that it was in the very first rack you crossed. It is the place with the rickety and rusted iron shelves, packed to the brim with books that have stood the tests of time with their folded edges and yellowed and faded covers. It is the comforting space whose memory fills you up with the musty smell of old books and the sweet warmth of coffee and brewing conversation, in between the folds of the pages.