1001 Nights Cast

You are with me in my place of work—a public library in an outpost suburb of an outpost city on the Indian Ocean edge of Australia.

Incoming books, returned after thorough reading with pages having been splayed open, sometimes forced into compromising positions to be read in often indelicate locations meet us every day. How are we to maintain the spines of these objects when we know books are taken into the bath for a ‘good read’, often being returned with the aromatic seasoning of oils of the orient and stained by bubbles of muscle-relaxing effervescence? Sometimes books are returned with beach sand and strips of salt bush used for book marks, sometimes with leaves of geranium or blooms of daisy pressed between pages; reminders of events while reading but abandoned in pages and time. We clean, dust, repair and return these carriers of other peoples’ lives to their shelf location, ready for their next adventure.

Placed into position and in order, the books take on a strength and potency of their own representing diverse knowledge on a particular subject, defined by its cover and its Dewey number. Individually the book can not stand unsupported and sometimes, left on its own, a book will bend out of shape, warp with humidity and loneliness: the support for books being the surrounding comrades of subject. We are the keepers of the knowledge, the herders of runaway books, the perfecters of the ‘libro-husbandry’ of librarianship.

There are 15 of us libro-husbands and most of us are wives and mothers. Over the years, husbands of wives have joined us here, undertaking the vows of librarianship to maintain strong spines and order in the shelf-life of our books. We meet each other on differing shifts comparing our external lives and sharing our own stories as we shelve and sort through returns or discards, removing the weak and the aged books. Often the aged books are herded and moved to a rounding up area of the library and shipped to a retirement shelf, in another library where life is less energetic and frenetic. Always there is another destination for a spine-damaged book that has been fingered and handled with less care than the author would have intended.

Morning tea and lunch breaks are spaces of interlude and often full of randomness and creativity. Lunches exchanged for more enticing cocktails of consumption have become the norm since Lizanne joined the library. She is no ordinary libro-wrangler, she comes with experiences that whet our appetites for long hot Indian summers. Before she married, Lizanne was an Air India hostess and was born into a wealthy family of Mumbai, that she always refers to as Bombay. Her mother still lives there and Lizanne returns every 6 months to support and manage her mother’s affairs. She also shops and returns bearing gifts of monumental beauty and delicate tracery for her work colleagues.

Lizanne has three sons and a husband whom she adores but has trouble cooking for. Lizanne hates hot curry. She can not abide the fiery emanations of her home country but her family can and do. She will often cook two meals every night; one for the men in her life and the other for herself, a milder version of their hot pots of dynamic flavour and heat. Often, Lizanne will approach various staff members, asking if they have brought their lunch as she would like to exchange hers for a less heavily seasoned midday meal. Her offerings are magnificent blends of special flavours, searched for in delicatessens and wholesalers in her neighbourhood or father afield, to provide the authentic tastes of the far away home of her husband and herself and to introduce and maintain connections for her children to their heritage, but she just can’t bear the taste. Willingly we take turns to trade our bland meals for her birianni or aloo bhaji, curry or moong dal with brinjal or complicated masalas or pickles of such fire and colour as to appear like paintings of exquisite tone and colour arrayed on a white plate.

Lizanne generously exchanges these dishes and always provides the backbone of each meal, basmatti rice as an accompaniment, no matter what other meal is on offer. Expectations of food and conversation repeatedly bring staff together while shelving our books. What has Lizanne brought in today? I will offer her my chicken and tomato sandwich, I bet that’s more attractive to her than Ben’s wife’s left over lasagne. And so approaches to Lizanne are made throughout the morning as we sit or stand, working at the rows of shelving. Not that we try to curry favour but there is a lot of competition for each day’s tantalising offering of lunch.

Without doubt, Lizanne has provided the glue of staff strength and galvanised our attentions to get through the routine of the day, the wrangling of our charges and that regimentation of our lives. The prospect of another story to accompany the day’s offering is as enticing as the revelation of the lunch time feast. Her peculiar aversion provides the journey back to India, back to the streets of Bombay and her father and mother. She brings stories that may be reworked with each telling but are as popular as the books we rehouse, with spines reinforced with every visit back from an adventure out of the library.