Lending Library

Dear dedicated reader,

It has been so long since I taught a class that I worry that I have forgotten how. My fingers are itching to hold chalk again, my mind hungers for the split-second decisions you must make at every moment, the awareness of what every child is doing all the time.

Instead, I spend my days designing curriculum, an occupation I find rewarding but easier to do in tandem with teaching. During the last two weeks, the students have been taking their first set of exams, which means no classes (even our Spoken English class has been cancelled so students can prepare). The school is on a rough trimester system here: the students take a formal set of school administered exams at the end of September, January, and then finally their annual exam in March/April. The other teachers must help administer the exams by being proctors. I am excused from this responsibility because of the small matter of not being able to speak Gujarati.

We have not, however, lost all contact with the students during this time. Five or six times a day, I will hear students calling to me from beyond the overgrown barbed wire that separates our house from the school. They wait patiently until I arrive at the open door and when I come out onto the porch, they say simply, “Book?”

I cannot take credit for this ever-growing arrangement: the genesis of the book-lending program that operates out of our guesthouse has its roots in a humble plastic bag. Early in the summer, one of the interns mentioned to one of the boys in her Spoken English Class that we had some English storybooks available in the guesthouse if he wanted to borrow them. Naturally, he came by our house during the school courtyard’s most crowded part of the day and when the other students saw that the American teachers were on the porch, they pushed in to see what was going on. The intern had to resort to smuggling the goods to the boy in a plastic bag or risk being overrun at that particular moment with requests for storybooks.

Over the summer, a few other students came to know of the arrangement. I have christened it such as it has never, even now, enjoyed any formal publicity. They heard from Amin that he had borrowed some books and so they also surreptitiously whispered what they wanted and received their deliveries in similar plastic bags. This book trade continued on a small scale up until the time that the interns left Kadod.

On returning from our Independence Day vacation, perhaps infected with the revolutionary feeling of the holiday itself, Melissa and I decided that we wanted shed the shackles of the furtive plastic bags and go public with the lending library. We began to give the books openly, even bring the entirety of the library (quite extensive at this point) out to the porch so the students could peruse the contents in a leisurely, unhurried way. Picking one book up carefully in their hands, a ninth standard boy would lightly turn the pages and take in the colorful schematic of the illustrations, perhaps putting this down, perhaps examining another, until he had finally made his choice.

The system is simple: we record the name of the book and the name of the student in the notebook that we keep for this purpose and simply check it off when the book has been returned to us. The students are surprisingly punctual: they return the books without fail within two or three days of borrowing them and the book is nearly always in perfect condition.

Slowly, unbeknownst to us clueless American teachers, word of the program has spread from mouth to mouth. It started with siblings of the ninth standard boys: my student Asad has five sisters, one of whom is also my student in 11^th standard, and she came with her friends to borrow some of our more complicated chapter books.

“Do you have any books about Hannah Montana?” She asked me, hopefully. I could only offer a short book-from-movie version of High School Musical: 2.

Soon afterwards, his younger sister showed up with her friends. She was in the seventh standard and her friends were delighted with the beautiful pictures. When the sixth standard girls saw the seventh standard girls with picture books, they soon came calling to me outside the door and soon this spread to even younger ages: fourth, third, and finally even little Anush from the first standard. I was hesitant to give him the book, but it was clear his siblings were going to carry it for him, so I carefully put his name in the record book and asked that it be back in two or three days.

I have no doubt that the popularity of this organically grown program has less to do with our ingenuity and more to do with the utter lack of English language alternatives here in Kadod. I recently discovered the school library, tucked away behind a few classrooms on the far side of the school. A dusty affair, the books are kept in locked glass cabinets and permission to browse can only be taken from the librarian himself, who on an impossibly confusing key ring holds the keys to the various cabinet padlocks.

“I’d like to see in this cabinet, if it’s all right,” I asked him on my first trip. I had spotted a few shelves of English books amongst the endless titles of Gujarati and allowed myself the small hope that perhaps I would not have to import all of my future reading material after all.

He smiled and came over, fumbling with the key ring and looking at the fifty or so keys it contained in a befuddled manner.

“I think I have it here,” he said, more to himself than to me, “wait a minute…”

I did.

He eyed the padlock, then the endless keys on the ring, and announced, “It’s broken. That cabinet can’t be opened.”

I wrinkled my forehead. “It can’t be opened at all?” I looked longingly at the books in English collecting dust behind the glass.

“The key isn’t here,” he said sadly. “And the padlock is broken. What can I do?”

I nodded and smiled, hoping he wouldn’t feel too badly. What could I have possibly expected?

And thus the alternative underground trade in storybooks continues to flourish out of our house.

Best,
Cat