A library anywhere

Illustration: Chancellor's Library by Maria Franz

Last year among the absolute inhumanness ravaging India-- anti-CAA protests, the government using force against student protests, the inevitable worst impact of the existing social structure and governance on the marginalized, the cold detachment in the workplace from real real things happening out in the very streets of Mumbai-- I started writing a story called "A library in Yisen".

Those days, I would vent my feelings of frustration and helplessness to my only friend at work, a friend who despite being not Indian took more of an interest in what was going on in the country than many other people I crossed paths with at work. So, a day after starting to write the story when I came back to work, I told her the story. A story that came to be because of everything that was happening around me.

*

The story was meant to be something like this: A woman from a free country comes to visit Yisen, a land where many decades back the government head had declared that all books in the country were to be burnt and new literature was to be written. Fairytales, books for educational purposes, songs, everything would be as he wanted, woven in with his message of a particular kind of solidarity and vision. Visitors to the country of Yisen were checked thoroughly, their luggage ransacked for traces of any material they might be carrying to disrupt what the head of the government was trying to create. But there was no trouble with the woman. She was truly an ordinary woman who had lived a normal life for decades, been parts of protests here and there, dipped in and out of different kinds of work and organizations, and had made some friends and acquaintances through the years. She lived alone and liked travelling and so when she heard of Yisen, she wondered what it must be like to live in such a country. Who would she become if she were there? How would the people of the country be living and feeling under such a government? Filled with thoughts and curiosity, she applied through the portal and hoped that her life had been uneventful enough for her to be allowed entry. Luckily for her, it had been and her application was approved. She could move, and move she did, to Yisen.

Some months after her arrival, quietly and eventually, like a gradual blooming, she became a revolutionary (which I would say she always was), telling people stories whenever she would meet them. Some would be stories from her life, some would be fragments from masterpieces out in the world, sometimes poetry, and sometimes in a Sheherazadesque manner she would try to tell a long tale over the course of many meetings. The government tried making sure that group gatherings couldn't happen, that meetings would only happen at a certain frequency, but the woman was a river of stories and all she did and could do was flow. No government stood a chance against that. Soon her designated time at Yisen came to an end and she left, leaving behind under stones across the city pages and pages of handwritten literature she had read across the world.

*

I did not write the story finally, I only told it to my friend and now to you as I write this essay. It's an essay about ideas and their strength and the vulnerability we all carry within us. We all-- even the most autocratic and threatening-looking leader or ruler which makes them (and humankind in general) afraid of ideas. To read is to listen and I have come to believe that real listening comes from an extremely vulnerable place within. It's where change takes place. Yet its working is completely outside of our grasp except through introspection, reflection and eventual expression.

*

I remember picking up a copy of "Old Man and the Sea" very hungrily from the school library. I was repeating 8th grade and hadn't made any friends yet. I spent my time in-between and during classes reading books. This was a slim book, easy to hide and I read it impatiently. I had heard such great things about the book that I couldn't wait to finish it. So I read and read and when it was done, I was crushed with disappointment. What on earth had I just read? What was this nonsense that everybody lauded? And Ernest Hemingway was meant to be great? Yuck. So, back went the book and took with it my impression of any greatness associated with Hemingway. Until a year or two later, when something happened.

I was sitting in class and listening absent-mindedly, when suddenly, literally like a bolt from the blue, I got it. Old Man and the Sea. I understood what it was about and felt tears well up in my eyes and a pressure in my chest. The man's loss felt almost unbearable. I finally understood the fisherman, his struggle and the feelings, all the feelings that the writer had tried containing in his words, in his story. And as much as I felt the heartbreak, I felt awe. How did that happen? How was I opened up? It was as if a seed had been planted deep within me and unbeknownst to me grown, grown, grown until it burst forth in this moment of understanding. It was that subtle and that deep, the capacity of a book, a writer, and life of course, to change someone.

I remember another similar instance. But for that some context is necessary. I used to be a supporter of capital punishment. I loved reading about criminals and psychopaths, found them fascinating but even when I was approaching my late teens, I felt no empathy toward them. I used to love the chapter in our sociology book titled "Crime and Deviance" and whenever I would read it, I would think about how to smooth out deviance or crime in society. My way of looking was cut off from any empathy for those who were being labelled as criminals and deviants. It's the approach that many have: one of looking at a problem, looking at the components that make up the problem and thinking of ways of changing the setup so that the problem no longer exists. It's an approach that is based on problem-solving rather than understanding and then trying to fix the problem. Anyway, I was lucky enough to be exposed to some experiences that confronted that part within me. What were they? Students of sociology and psychology at our school were taken for two documentary viewings and a talk by a former convict at the American Center in Kolkata. The first documentary was about a women's prison in the US. They interviewed some of the inmates and I didn't see the point of it. I felt annoyed and bored and found the documentary pointless. By the time the second documentary ended, I was annoyed and livid. The second one was about the Presidency jail in Kolkata and the conditions in which prisoners lived there. I remember some of my classmates being soft and saying how sad it was--particularly in response to seeing an old prisoner, about 90 years old, being interviewed in the documentary whose health was deteriorating and who wanted clemency to be let out and live out the rest of his days outside-- and me snapping at them that they were gullible and easily manipulated. If the documentary had been shown from the perspective of the murdered victims and the families' grief, they would have certainly felt that way about the victims too.

I was at a place far away from the internal growth needed where these two truths could co-exist. I could not feel empathy for the criminals and the victims. Feeling empathy for those who committed such heinous acts felt like going against the ones who had had to suffer. At that time, in my eyes, an eye for an eye was still justice and not a way where the world ended up blind. And then that year or the next, I remember picking up Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood". It's a literary account of Capote's reading of a family's murder and his perspective, drawn from interviews and going through different material, on the murderers, especially one of them. And that book again changed me. Something in me was completely altered, so altered that by the time I finished the book, I was aggrieved that I had ever supported capital punishment. Since then, I have often thought about justice and its mechanisms across the world. It's been something I have thought about since I was a child but my way of looking has changed, and I know now that it might again. And books quietly carrying feelings and thoughts were pivotal for both those changes.

Those two instances were extremely drastic which is why I noticed them. But I know many other instances where I have been altered by what I have read, the most common one being poetry. Too often I find myself running into lines that speak to me so deeply that I am not who I was when I started reading the poem. It's not as easy for me to trace the change externally as it is in cases like the ones mentioned above but I feel it in me, that I am changed. And change is almost always perceived as threatening by anyone who has an idea of how they want the world, themselves, and life to look like. Sometimes I see that in myself, that my struggles stem from the fact that I am changed or changing and it's not who I was or thought I was going to be. When I see resistance in myself and in others, I see that it stems from a desire to not be changed. This is where libraries come in. A public library ideally can contain all the thoughts and feelings that humans of a particular society have written and put out in the world. It can contain the most sacred text and the most profane. Especially in a healthy democracy, it can contain dominant and alternative discourses. It can be the place where one enters knowing that they will probably leave changed if they so desire.

What happens in a world like Yisen? I never wrote the story because I imagined human beings drawing parallels to things in the real world. So I write and ask in this essay, is such a country imaginable for you? Can you stay with that idea and imagine what would lead to a government like that? What life would be like in such a governance? Would writers and poets and singers and comedians be in jail? Would the people sleeping and living in their rooms be afraid of changing themselves and so accept the government until someone different did otherwise? How would they be? How would we be if we were there?

I want to end with some panels out of Alan Moore's "V for Vendetta," a comic that I have not read except through excerpts. Some powerful stuff conveyed through art.