The Rental Libraries of Quetta
"The sight of books remove sorrow from the heart."
(Moroccan proverb)
"If we are imprisoned in ourselves, books provide us with the means of escape. If we have run too far away from ourselves, books show us the way back."
Holbrook Jackson
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The scene: Quetta in January. Cold. Freezing cold! It’s early Sunday morning---another bleak,
January day. The pothole infested back lanes, off the main Toghi Road, are
frozen and slippery. My friend Ibrahim and I, shivering non-stop and, using our
gloved hands, perform the intermittent ritual of cupping our faces and ears and
wiping our moist, leaky noses with the back of the same hands every few minutes
as we stand and wait at the corner of Musa Jee Lane and Zonki Ram Road for
Qadeer bhai to appear and open his rental library. Clad in the similar
polyester LT jackets, or LT look-alike (fake) ones, and engaged in the same cupping-wiping
ritual trying to keep warm, there are a few other boys, too, all of them
waiting. Tucked under our arms, in the warmth of our armpits, are pairs of
books that we have just read, the day before.
I have two of the recent installments of Maut Ka Taaqqub series, and
Ibrahim has his favorite, the Umro Ayyar books. We are waiting to get our hands
on the next books in these two incredibly popular series. Qadeer bhai, a
ridiculously quiet man with a trade-mark sad smile on his face, is a laid- back
guy, a Quetta version of the “The Dude” Lebowski, minus the size. And he never
shows up on time!
Quetta in the late 1970s and early 1980s had many of these
small rental libraries. Most, if not every, mohalla, or neighborhood, had one.
Our favorite was the Qadeer (Rental) Library. It was behind the old Delight
Cinema (now demolished to make way for a new shopping mall, I am told), on one
of the side streets, off the main Toghi Road. The usual overnight rent for a
fiction book was eight ana (50 paisa) in those days, which went up to a rupee
in the later years. Hot or popular books, like the ones in the Umro Ayyar and Amir
Hamza series, Tarzan series, Imran series, Inspector Jamshed, Inspector Kamran
Mirza and especially Maut Ka Taaqub series had long waiting lines. While I also
read books from most of the other ones, my favorite was the 50-part Maut Ka
Taaqqub series (The Chase of Death or Death Chase). I was too fascinated with
the three main characters in the story: Umber, Naag and Maria, all of them with
super-human powers, both physical and intellectual. To give the reader a sense
of this fascination, for many of us these books were like H.G. Wells, C.S.
Lewis, J.K Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Ludlum and Stephen King all rolled into
one super-adventure-cum-horror-cum-fantasy-cum-science-fiction. This is no
exaggeration. After all, with nothing else to have a claim on our attention in
those days---no video games, no computers, no smart phones or Internet and
social media etc.---the books were the main source of entertainment (“infotainment”) for the youth, especially in the freezing Quetta winters.
Yes, there was TV, and cinema, too. But they were nothing
like what we have today with unlimited number of on-demand channels providing
programs on and about everything under the sun. TV had limited shows and hours.
There were only two channels, one national, PTV, and a local channel, with only
a few shows for children. Cinema was a once-in-a-blue-moon affair for many of
us, depending on the movies and the mood of the parent, usually the father.
The MTV age arrived with an AV (audio-visual) bang, and probably
the very first video song played on it was The Buggles’ chart topper, an
extended jingle actually, titled “Video Killed the Radio Song”. Lots of other
stuff followed, all of which re-defined entertainment. We know everything
changed after that. Well, at least those of us old enough to have witnessed and
experienced the phenomenon know that it did. In the realm
of music, video may or may not have killed the radio song, but I think what really killed
the small rental libraries in Quetta was not so much TV or MTV and its clones,
or not just the TV alone, but what connected to it via a black cable: the VCR,
or the Video Cassette Recorder and Bollywood movies. Both the hardware and the
software, so to speak.
It all started with the Sony BetaMax machines which were very soon replaced by the ubiquitous industry standard machines based on the VHS system. Actually, before these two, for a short while there was the Philips Video Player with bulky, brick sized video tapes, three of which were needed to store a single two hour plus Bollywood movie. So primitive was this piece of European technology, or perhaps because it was designed solely for use in cold Europe, that a separate pedestal (portable) fan was needed for preventing it from overheating as it played the latest Bollywood blockbusters! With the arrival of the VCR, it seemed that we had permanently moved on, from the universe of the printed word to the age of the moving images, fully complemented with stereo sound and I am not sure if that move was real progress for us.
To be precise, it was Amitabh Bachchan, Rajesh Khanna,
Dharmendra, Zeenat Aman, Rekha, Rakhi, Rishi Kapoor, Shashi Kaporr, Hema
Malini, Neethu Singh, Shatrugan Sinha, Amjad Khan, Pran, Danny and a host of
others that killed these libraries, to use that apt word from the MTV song.
Soon after the VCR became cheap enough to possess, and along with the TV,
became a must-have item for families, these rental libraries were replaced with
video shops. At one point in early / mid 1980s, there were at least ten of them
on Toghi Road alone. They were everywhere in the city, the famous ones with
huge collection of movies being on Shawak Shah Road and Abdus Sattar Road.
While at many homes the bookshelves made way for fancy TV-VCR combo cabinets
fully equipped with theatre quality sound systems, in the neighborhoods the
rental libraries vanished, one by one. If I am recalling correctly, Qadeer
Bhai’s library closed down in or around 1984. Like his old book sanctuary, he
also vanished.
The Roman orator-statesman-philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero
has said, "A room without books is like a body without a soul.' Books have
always been at the center of great civilizations, at the core of their great
cultural achievements in the form of arts, sciences, discoveries and
inventions. For example, the Islamic civilization during its more than half
millennium rule of glory was the envy of the world. It was especially known for
the books it relentlessly churned out in all major fields of knowledge, from
astronomy to mathematics, to medicine and philosophy. It was able to do so
because Muslims, as the followers of the last monotheistic religion, the last “people
of the book,” then knew the importance of books. After all, The Holy Quran, The
Mother of All Books (Ummul Kitab), was at the center of their faith, the very definition
of it, the heart and soul of their deen. They knew very well the deep
significance of that fact, the centrality of The Holy Book for them as a people
of faith. Its deep and all-encompassing symbolism was never lost on them. Since
in Islam the Word of Allah was made into book, into The Book, how could a
Muslim not be a producer, reader, collector, promoter and a lover of books?
Such is not the case today, alas. Today, the annual number
of books produced in the entire Islamic world, the Ummah, is less than what a
small country in Europe produces annually. The 57 countries in the Organization
of Islamic Conference (OIC) spend a mere 0.81 % of their annual GDP on research
and development, out of which usually comes the bulk of publications. The
situation is even worse in the Arab-Muslim world. For example, in 2005, Harvard
University produced more scientific papers than 17 Arabic-speaking countries
combined. As the recent UN Arab Human Development Reports have noted, the total
number of books translated into Arabic in the last 1000 years is fewer than
those translated into Spanish in one year! That’s how bad it is. The Arab
potentates of today are known not for their humane and valuable contributions
to the collective knowledge and cultural pool of humanity, but for the brutal public
hanging and chopping up of dissenting clerics, critical writers and bloggers and artists. In
short, books are no longer central to the civilization of Sina, Farabi,
Ghazzali, Rushd, Razi, Arabi, Khayyam,
Khaldun, Suharwardi, Tusi, Sadra and other luminaries of the Islamic past.
I don’t know about my friend Ibrahim, but the books from
Qadeer Bhai’s library, in addition to the pulp fiction that we had at home---all
bought at book stores like The Book Land and The Quetta Bookstall on Jinnah Road---and
my father’s monthly Suspense, Sabrang, Jasoosi and Ibn e Safi digests did great
wonders for me. They instilled in me not only the habit of reading regularly
but also a love of books, a passion that has grown more intense over the years.
There aren’t many things in this world that can bring me the kind of deep joy I
experience from reading a good book on a cold, rainy day. From what I read and
observe, I must say that many of us are now quickly becoming incapable of
experiencing that kind of authentic joy, the calm satisfaction that often comes
from doing things that require concentrated attention, are demanding, time
consuming or what we now routinely complain about as being “inconvenient” for
us in all sorts of ways. This is especially true for those of us who happily withdraw
en masse into the wordless, paperless, image-based universe of digital
technologies. One can understand the wisdom in the critical observation of the
writer Ray Bradbury when he wrote the following: “You don’t have to burn books
to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
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