The books around the corner.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

A citizen in Ghaziabad tends to fondly recall her childhood in Allahabad town. Once a week she would walk from her home to the mohalla market, stepping into a tiny room crammed with books. It was the neighbourhood’s lending library. Now, she says, she lives in a city so big that it has no place for a space as homey as a lending library.

But Delhi neighbourhoods did harbour lending libraries. Members would drop in regularly into those libraries to get new reading material. They would also chat with the library owner, sometimes gossiping about fellow members not seen for long. Many of these lending libraries have gone extinct. The one in Defence Colony Market is a fast food shack. The one in Prithviraj Market is a stationery. The one in Shankar Market… continues to remain a lending library. This afternoon, the owner, the genial Manjula Sharma, is pacing inside her library, crammed with thousands of old paperbacks.

The primary aspect of a neighbourhood lending library is that it gives maximum visibility to easy-read stuff. These are kinds of books that your elderly bua ji at home, as well as your teenage nephew, might equally enjoy. Indeed, during the pre-mobile era, an entire generation’s loyalty to Enid Blyton, Danielle Steele, Agatha Christie, Robert Ludlum, Sidney Sheldon, Mills & Boon etc, was partly a consequence of these lending libraries. This lending library has that same character, peopled with writers as addictive as Nicholas Sparks, Michael Crichton, Jeffrey Archer… an entire shelf is devoted to Enid Blyton! While parts of the floor are claimed by romance novels with titles you might not want to show mummy-papa: The Earl Claims the Wife, To Bed a Beauty, Never a Lady, The Duke’s Captive, and Wicked Deceiver.

Waving her arms, the library lady says: “This side is romance, this side is thriller.” The library dates to 1930, she says, and moved from Irwin Road to Shankar Market in 1955, the year the market came into existence. The founder—Aligarh native Ram Gopal Sharma—was her father-in-law. He gave his name to the establishment. “We had 500 members during the 1980s,” says the library lady. “Today we have 50.” She nevertheless continues to run it “because I have a passion for books.” (Her daughter-in-law, Nidhi Verma, too is into books. She teaches English literature in Delhi University.)

It must be pointed out that the Shankar Market’s lending library survives partly because it also has a lucrative business of supplying glossy magazines to the area’s offices. Some of those periodicals are in fact hanging by a string. The binder clips holding the magazines together bear the seal of Delhi City Limits. It was a city magazine that has gone the way of most lending libraries.

PS: Photo shows Manjula Sharma with colleague Ravi Karan