Ghalib’s calling cards.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Delhi’s book-filled Ghalib Academy Library overlooks poet Ghalib’s tomb. The library is doubly noteworthy for its two large handsome wooden cabinets. They preserve something rare.

Each cabinet is arrayed out into scores of long drawers. Each drawer contains stacks of so-called note cards. Slightly larger than a standard-issue visiting card, the card traditionally constituted a public library’s most basic building block, commanding an architecture of its own. Pull open any drawer. Every card within has a hole punched through its centre. Look more carefully—a slim steel chord installed in the drawer is running through the hole of each card, keeping all in place. Every one of these cards corresponds to a book in the library, detailing in-depth info about the book—explains Bushra Begum, the Ghalib Academy librarian.

This all looks unfamiliar to a contemporary eye, but it was a humdrum sight for librarians back in the time when our parents were of our age. The card catalogue would enable the librarian to systematically arrange the books across the shelves. Whatever, this afternoon, Bushra Begum is fussing over the cabinet parked beside the nearest window to her desk. Her fingers are busily shuffling through a drawer’s fat stack of cards. They abruptly pause on reaching a card marked with the name of author Gopi Chand Narang. This card is partly scrawled in what appears to be a code. “Library language,” Bushra Begum mutters.

Delhi’s other public libraries too had this same cataloguing system. Rendered obsolete by computers, some city libraries disposed off their cards, some still have theirs but covered in dust. (Same saga unfolded across the world. In 1994, New Yorker magazine published a story on how various American libraries, including “the New York Public Library, Harvard, and others, discarded their index card files and replaced them with inferior on-line systems.”)

Ghalib Academy library however is keeping its card drawers in excellent condition. Thousands of cards are spread across the two cabinets, arranged alphabetically. Most of the cards bear handwritten scrawls. Almost all of them were compiled by a “loyal friend” of the library—the venerable Naseem Abbasi, the late poet who had retired as a deputy librarian in Delhi University. “Our library’s card catalogue system is a monument to Naseem sir,” emphasises Bushra Begum.

That said, today these cards are useless. The library computerised its cataloguing early this century. The info about all of the library’s 14,000 books is available on the click of a keyboard button. Yet, moments ago, Bushra Begum was resorting to the old outdated card cabinet to trace her Gopi Chand Narang volume. She laughs. “I find it easier this way… especially during power-cuts when my computer goes dark.”