Apekshita Varshney

Sharmila Joshi

Editor

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“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” says 19-year-old
Faiza Ansari in a low voice, almost a whisper. We are sitting cross-legged on
the tiled floor of the only library for women in Mumbra – the Rehnuma Library
Centre.​

More young women come and go from the two-room
apartment turned library on the first floor in a decrepit building near the Darul Falah mosque. They hang
their burkhas
on idle plastic chairs and sprawl on the cool floor. It’s 36 degrees outside in
this northeastern suburb roughly 35 kilometres from central Mumbai.

As Faiza recalls Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, I insist on hearing
more. All eyes turn towards her, including her sister Razia’s. Faiza
paraphrases a line from Romeo and Juliet, “A beautiful heart is better
than a beautiful face.” Razia looks at her sister coyly. The other girls hoot,
nudge each other, and bashfully giggle. The joke is anybody’s guess. 

Razia Ansari, 18, is not as shy. She presents to me an
intriguing summary of the only Shakespeare story she has read. “Twelfth Night is like a Hindi film. Viola has a double role,” she
says of Viola’s disguise as Cesario. Razia is trying to improve her English and
has joined the spoken English class at the library. Classes are conducted here five days a week in numerous one-hour batches
from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Faiza and Razia’s
family moved to Mumbra from Asansol
village in Dumka district of Jharkhand around 18 months ago. The sisters
dislike Mumbra. &quot;There&#39;s garbage everywhere,&quot; Razia says. Faiza agrees: &quot;There are more eateries than bookshops.&quot; The sisters were not
expected to wear a burkha in their village. &quot;We had a lot of
freedom back home,&quot; Razia says. &quot;But here,&quot; Faiza continues,
&quot;our mother says that the mahol [environment] is not good.&quot; 

Their father owned a wholesale groceries shop in
Asansol and decided to come to Mumbai, where their grandmother and other family
members already lived, &quot;to make
more money and for better education for the children,” Razia says. He has since set up a groceries shop near their house.

The sisters spend
a majority of their day at the nearby A.E. Kalsekar Degree College, where they are studying in the first and
second year BA, respectively. But it’s in the Rehnuma library, a short walk
from their home, that they are reminded, Razia says, “of the home they left
behind [in the village].”   

For Bashira Shah,
from Babhnan village in
Harraiya tehsil of Uttar Pradesh, the library is where she can stop thinking about home. Bashira
got married when she was around 14 years old and moved to her husband’s house in Ashokpur village near Gonda city. Her husband was a
construction labourer in Saudi Arabia. Now 36, she has been widowed for two
years and lives with her mother, her four children, and two younger sisters in
Mumbra.

Her parents moved
here in the 2000s but in October 2017, her father passed away. He
had a dry fruits shop in Masjid Bunder which is now leased out. Two of
Bashira’s sons, 16 and 15 years old, have dropped out of school. But Bashira, who received
a religious education and studied Urdu till Class 3, has decided to study
more. &quot;My dream, she says, “is to be able to talk to Shamshir
and Shifa in English.&quot; Shamshir, 12, her youngest son and her daughter Shifa,
9, study at the Mumbra Public School in English.  

Since the Rehnuma
Library – rehnuma means a ‘guide’ in Urdu and Hindi – was started in 2003, women come here throughout
the day to converse, laugh, relax, or curl up with a book. The library was set up with donations and a
crowd-funding campaign by Awaaz-e-Niswaan, a non-governmental
organisation. The space is also the NGO’s Mumbra centre, where they focus on
literacy for women and legal aid – many women come here with issues related to
divorce, polygamy and domestic violence, among others.

The locality was chosen because of
its predominantly Muslim population and, as Yasmeen Aga, Awaaz-e-Niswaan&#39;s
coordinator for Mumbra says, &quot;the lack of spaces for women to take off
their burkha,
interact with each other and relax.&quot;  The library initially acquired members by
telling schoolgirls and their mothers about it, but as college girls found out,
they too wanted to join. 

The library’s 350 patrons – all women, many of them from families that have migrated to Mumbai
from various villages – renew their Rs. 100
membership every year to return home with books or magazines and occasionally
participate in book club meetings and workshops.

In the last book club
meeting in mid-January, 12 young women discussed the poems of Mirza Ghalib and
Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Librarian Faiza Khan says, “The readers were divided into two
camps – each wanting the other to concede and admit that the poet they admired
was the best.”  Faiza, was in the Ghalib
camp, but chose to remain sternly neutral.

Faiza, now 28, started coming to
Rehnuma when she was 19. She was born
and brought up in Mumbra, has a degree in Management Studies,  and was offered
the librarian’s job in 2014.  &quot;The public spaces are dominated by
men,&quot; she says. &quot;And women are locked inside their houses&quot;. But
at the library, she says, &quot;women can be unabashed and sit and talk like
men do.&quot;

She not only holds the key to the library, but also
helps wandering visitors become members, and nurtures their reading tastes.
“Urdu books,” she says, “are the most sought after.&quot; These make the majority of
the 6,000 books stocked in the library’s five wood cabinets.

Some of the most
popular books are by Pakistani authors that have been on long journeys. The
pages of Ibn-e-Safi’s Imran
series and Jasoosi Duniya, highly popular spy novels, have turned yellow. The
library has a collection of 72 Ibn-e-Safi novels.

And the pages of the novels of Umera Ahmad (the library’s most-read author), to Faiza’s utter dismay,
are dog-eared with plenty of margin notes. There are also books by Razia Butt,
Ismat Chughtai, Munshi Premchand, Saadat Hasan Manto, along with the Urdu translations of
Shakespeare. And there is Harry Potter, and of course, Chetan Bhagat too.  

Zardab Shah, 20,
who came to Mumbra from Khizirpur
Ali Nagar village in Ghazipur district of Uttar Pradesh, has been
reading Ujaale
ki Talaash, a thriller in Hindi by Sharad Pagare, but wistfully
looks at the World Book Encyclopaedia placed at the top of a cabinet. “We are
not allowed to take these home,” she says, regretfully. “I like to look at the
maps and imagine going on an adventure to Switzerland.”

The closest Shah
has got to a sense of adventure was when she secured admission at Banaras Hindu
University for an MA in English last year. But her parents didn’t let her go. Her
father is a truck driver, her mother a homemaker. “They didn’t want me to live
in a hostel,” she says. Instead, they moved Zardab from her uncle’s home in the
village – where she was staying while studying – to be with them in Mumbra.  She is now trying to get admission
in a Mumbai college. When someone in her building told her about Rehnuma,
she immediately joined.

“I was wasting my time in the village… here, at least,
I am reading and learning,” she says. It took her some time to get used to
Mumbra, but Zardab doesn’t miss her village. “There are no opportunities,” she
says. “It’s a place you can love as a child but not as a grown-up.” And now she
has forged an attachment so strong with the Rehnuma Library, that, she
confides, “this might be all the adventure I need”.

A large number of Muslim families moved to Mumbra after the 1992 riots in Bombay. Shafiya Shaikh&#39;s family too shifted at that time, distraught but physically unharmed, from Worli in south Mumbai. The first time she came to Rehnuma was when she was seeking help to get a divorce from her husband. He had abandoned a pregnant Shafiya after eight months of marriage. But when she saw the stacked books, she was confused, “I thought that like everything else for women in our society, even books were out of reach.” Soon, Shafiya and her mother Haseena Bano became members. Shafiya, now 27, also reads some of the books out to her four-year-old daughter Misbaah Fatima. The Shaikhs are now among the most voracious readers the library has seen – they check out 2-3 books and 2-3 magazines per week while others read and return one book in a couple of months.Shafiya is currently reading Jannat Ke Pattay by Nemrah Ahmed, an acclaimed Pakistani novelist. It’s about sexual violence against a girl, and the story’s male lead doesn’t save her. “It’s not like a hero will come to save everyone,” she says.Apart from the lure of the books, the library brings women together to enjoy the company of others. Here, Zardab says, “We can sit however we like, laugh, play, or chat. There’s freedom here that we don’t find at home.” A current hot topic is the popular Zee TV show about triple talaq – Ishq Subhan Allah. Librarian Faiza has also become a role model for the young women – a job she has reluctantly accepted. She now takes it upon herself to gather them and discuss books they may not read themselves. The last book she discussed was Rana Ayyub&#39;s Gujarat Files – on the investigations in the 2002 riots in the state – and unlike the Ghalib-Faiz session, this discussion remained utterly sombre.

The library of long journeys

দীঘলীয়া জীৱনযাত্ৰাৰ সহযাত্ৰী গ্ৰন্থাগাৰ এটাৰ কথাৰে

ഒരു വായനശാലയുടെ ദീർഘസഞ്ചാരം

সুদূর সাকিনে ছাপা সে কুতুবখানা

நீண்ட பயணங்களின் நூலகம்

خواتین کیلئے علم و سکون کی جگہ – رہنما لائبریری

ଲମ୍ବା ଯାତ୍ରାର ପାଠାଗାର

सुदूर प्रवासांचं एक ग्रंथालय

Mumbai

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The library of long journeys

The Rehnuma centre in Mumbra, a suburb of Mumbai, offers young Muslim women – many from migrant families – a space to chat, relax with a book, learn English or dream about their village homes

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