'Library': Sehri Tales selections, Day 15

I.

The school library sits tucked away on one end of the fifth floor hall, sunlit and two stories tall. Beside its glass wall, a young girl is reading in a chair in the aisle between the reference shelves. 
Nadia flips through the plays of Tagore, searching for one she could audition from. In her lap is a Bengali dictionary, with a pencil marking the last page as a bookmark. She mutters to herself often. 
The murmur of distant sports in the courtyard below and the rustle of pages sounds something like peace. The sun warms her hands as she picks a monologue, and begins to read aloud in a soft whisper. 
In her head she thanks the library teacher for allowing her in whenever, and as the monologue etches itself into her memory her worries melt away. Her shoulders loosen. The thoughts of exams and a daughter's responsibility lift. In this little nook, sequestered away from the duties of society, Nadia is happy. 
Nadia is content. All is well here.

by Bornil Murchhona 

II. 

Merry finally figured out what the fuss was about. Clean Bauhaus lines, concrete columns, and clear-white exterior walls quickly captivated her visual senses. She felt as though she had arrived at a temple-modern yet holy. Libraries are indeed, temples of knowledge.
They made sure that the state-of-the-art structure offered a sea of knowledge. Series of floor-to-ceiling stacks displayed bundles of books- that bore nothing of the baffling past and a boisterous view of the future of Merry's beloved motherland. Milton was wrong, she thought. Paradise was not lost— it was there, within this lush realm of wisdom.
Merry found the reading rooms to be grave silent. It was a sign of their civility. They are the torchbearers of homo sapiens. All the chaos had been concealed carefully so that they could read peacefully. It required a lot of blood-shedding, and years of cleansing of barbarics of the barren desert- to reach this level of sophistication and clarity.
Merry wanted to know about the past. She heard myths about grand libraries that stood there—made of crimson-chrome sandstones. Ghost stories of sepia walls that carried scriptures of God, tales of dunes, and delusions of arch-shaped doors. She vainly browsed through many archeological books. Little did the girl know, that Paradise was not lost but Palestine was.

Stepping out of the clean white temple, Merry took a stroll by the shore. Clulessly she wondered why the Mediterranean Sea seemed so somber and blue.

by Rahman Tas

III.

The glass container shatters into coruscating shards. The scent takes a moment to jolt to life, and then percolates through the senses all at once. The distinct smell of ancient books cloth bound by the cries of wistful poets mingling with the nostalgic notes of old timber - the symphonic dance of a bygone era. Clara protected the bottle of the beloved aroma like an endangered treasure, coveting the last remnants of a family legacy now traceless. Libraries were an ancient relic now, what with all things conceivable now digitalized.
Wrapped in loose papers untethered from the worn books in her grandma's library, Clara's mother gifted her the perfume bottle like a family heirloom. An infant of the 2050s, Clara was lucky to have experienced the touch of books in her childhood, flicking through pages drenched in history while book stores and libraries became scarce. Courtesy of her librarian grandmother, she savored the feel of offset papers underneath her fingertips, the musty smell of decrepit shelves, the emotions that the amalgamation of thousands of tales evoke within four walls. The glass bottle became all the more coveted once the library burnt down to ashes one fateful evening a neighbor decided to play the role of a reckless pyromaniac.
Both her mother and grandmother were long gone, but their memories lived on, in the spilled liquid now travelling undeterred across the dirty floors of Clara's apartment. Soon that would fade too, until nothing remained of her cherished past.

by Ramisha Rahman