Public Library and Other Stories

~ ~ ~

This is what Kamila Shamsie told me about why libraries, and what becomes of libraries, matter:

The library was located on Bleak House Road. It had high ceilings, and whirring fans and thick brick walls painted light blue which kept both paper and humans from curling over in the Karachi heat. Those were the days of military dictatorship when the movie ‘Rambo III’ (in which the hero killed Soviets in Afghanistan) seemed to be the only cultural import that the state deemed necessary for its citizens; some English language bookshops did exist but they were likely to stock primarily the kinds of novel that I would later learn to refer to as ‘airport bestsellers’ rather than anything that conformed to my childhood tastes. Besides, my reading rate of a book a day would have made it impossible for bookstores alone to meet my needs, even if we weren’t in Rambo world.

And so, the visits to the British Council library on Bleak House Road where, if memory serves, a single pink library card allowed you to withdraw six books at a time. I read my way from childhood to adolescence here — Rumpole of the Bailey left me cold, but Mary Renault’s Alexander trilogy was everything I wanted from fiction. That I remember those grim days of dictatorships as personally filled with joy and possibility has more than a little to do with the thrill of a library where it was possible to encounter the whole world from Alexander the Great to the newest version of me (for what better way to mark the changes in yourself than via the books your eyes once skipped over which now hold you in their thrall?).

In 2002, post 9/11 ‘security concerns’ shut down the library. It has yet to re-open. Talk to Karachi’s citizens long enough about what that vast, troubled city of 20 million plus most needs and eventually you stumble on the phrase ‘places to escape to’. In other words, libraries.