The Library That Stayed Open During the Riots
Outside, the city burned; inside, the librarian kept issuing books.
The tear gas reached the reading room before the news did.
It arrived as a smell, something between burnt chillies and a swimming pool, curling under the tall green doors of the municipal library. Mrs. Almeida looked up from the issue desk, sniffed once, and said, "Windows." That was all. Two engineering students and I ran around the hall slamming the old teak shutters while she went on stamping the return date into a copy of Wuthering Heights. Thump. Thump. As if nothing outside had an appointment with her.
That was the summer our city cracked open.
I won't name the city, because it could be any of them. Every city keeps a riot folded in its back pocket, and that June somebody pulled ours out. Buses burned three streets from the library. The fish market where my mother haggled every Sunday had its shutters bent inward, as if the whole street had been punched in the mouth.
I was nineteen, and I was in the library that afternoon for the least noble reason imaginable. It had a working ceiling fan and my house did not, and I had a physics exam I was going to fail in either location. When the shouting started, far away at first, I told myself it was a cricket match... shouting in our city usually was.
By four o'clock the radio behind the desk had used the word curfew, and there were seven of us locked in with the books. Me. The two engineering students. A retired teacher named Mr. Kelkar, who came every day to read the same newspapers twice. A woman with a toddler asleep on her shoulder. And a courier who kept glancing at the door like it owed him money.
"We should close," the courier said. "Madam, lock up, lights off. They see lights, they come."
Mrs. Almeida did not look up. "The library is open until eight. It has been open until eight since 1963."
"Madam, there is a riot."
"There is also a lending service."
I laughed, one sharp stupid bark, because fear does strange things to nineteen-year-olds. She looked at me over her spectacles the way librarians have looked at boys since libraries were invented, and I went back to pretending to study.
The fan wobbled overhead. The hall smelled of old glue and new smoke. Somewhere beyond the shutters, glass made the sound glass makes when it stops being a window.
At five, someone banged on the doors. Not knocking. Banging, flat palm first, then something harder. The toddler woke and did not cry... which was somehow worse. Mrs. Almeida walked the length of the hall in her rubber chappals, drew back the bolt, and opened the door before any of us could reach her.
A boy stood there. Sixteen... maybe seventeen. A rag tied over his nose and mouth, eyes streaming from the gas, chest working like a bellows. Behind him the street glowed orange in a way streets should never glow. Any one of us would have shut the door on him.
She stepped aside and said, "Wipe your feet."
He came in. She bolted the door behind him. Then, and I still think about this part more than the fires, she took a blank card from her drawer, uncapped her pen, and asked him his name.
"What?" he said.
"Your name. For the card. Three books at a time, fourteen days, one rupee fine per day after that."
He stared at her. He had come in off a burning street and this small woman in a starched cotton sari was issuing him a library membership. He gave his name in a whisper... like a confession. She wrote it in her tilted convent handwriting, stamped the card, slid it across the desk, and pointed him toward the washroom, where, she informed him, there was soap.
Mr. Kelkar leaned toward me from behind his newspaper. "She did the same thing in '84," he murmured. When I asked what he meant, he only shook the pages straight and went on reading yesterday's news for the second time.
The evening stretched. The streetlights should have come on and didn't. Mrs. Almeida made tea on the little stove meant for her own four o'clock cup, seven cups now, passed around on a tin tray with the library's name painted on it. The toddler slept on a folded shawl between Geography and Reference. The courier taught the engineering boys a card game using blank issue slips, and lost to them twice, loudly. The boy from the street sat in the corner with his washed face and, after an hour of staring at nothing, took down a book of film songs and moved his lips through it.
Around nine, when the noise had rolled away toward the mills, I helped her carry the cups to the back and asked the question nineteen-year-olds ask because they don't know any better. Why didn't you close?
She was quiet... long enough that I thought I had offended her. Then she said, "In '84 we closed early. Head office order. There was a boy who read here every evening. Milind. Standard ten. He had nowhere else to be after school, so he was here, always, that table by the window. I put him out at four o'clock and bolted this door, and he started walking home." She straightened a stack of forms that did not need straightening.
"He never reached."
"You couldn't have known," I said, because that is what people say.
"No," she agreed. "But a door can only do two things. And that day I had it doing the wrong one."
We slept in the reading room that night, seven strangers and a toddler, under the wobbling fan, while she sat at her desk with the lamp on. Not reading... just keeping the light in the window, which I understood, finally, was the whole point.
The light was not carelessness. The light was the message.
I went home at dawn. My mother slapped me, then wept on me, then fed me, in that order. The city stitched itself back together the way cities do, badly and quickly, and I failed the physics exam with real distinction. But I kept the library card. I kept going back, too, long after the exams ended, because some rooms teach you more than what is printed in them.
A date stamp is a small machine for believing in tomorrow. It prints a day that has not arrived yet and trusts you to live long enough to bring the book back.
It took me twenty years to write about that night. Every earlier attempt came out as a speech, and she was not a speech. What finally worked was small: not the fires, just the thump of her stamp going down while the windows turned orange. I had spent years trying to write about hope and producing greeting cards, until she taught me, at two decades' distance, that hope is not a feeling. It is a woman refusing to change her hours.
I posted the poem on a community wall for poets, mostly so it would stop circling my head, and then entered it into a monthly poetry contest, where it did not win anything. But a stranger left a comment underneath that I have saved to this day: my grandmother was a nurse in '47, she also refused to close. That is when I understood Mrs. Almeida was not one woman. She is a position that gets staffed, in every burning city, by somebody.
Last winter I was back in that city for a wedding, and I walked to the library the way you walk to check on an old tooth. Mrs. Almeida died some years ago; the new librarian is a young man with a nose ring and a laptop, and the hours painted on the board are the same. Open until eight. I told him I had been there in the riot summer, and he nodded the way the young nod at old men, kindly, from a great distance.
As I was leaving, he pulled a returned book toward himself and brought the stamp down on the slip. Thump. That small dry sound, a day that had not happened yet, pressed in violet ink onto paper. And the whole burning summer folded itself neatly back into the city's pocket, where it lives, where it waits, where a light in a window is still the message.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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