The Children's Multimedia Library in Malé, Maldives
Parents, books, and the island city that will sink by the end of the century
The Children’s Multimedia Library in Malé, Maldives was a tiring walk away from our scrappy apartment building. There was a library in our school as well. It was a lot closer than the Children’s Multimedia Library, but it let you borrow just one book at a time and it lacked a DVD collection of English films to choose from. It was also a lot less colourful, and I never really liked the books in it either. Naturally, the Children’s Multimedia Library presented itself as the clear choice for the Vohra children’s recreational needs.
For two years, almost every other weekend, we’d walk to the library on Boduthakurufaanu Magu, dripping in sunscreen and sweat. It was summer all year round in Malé, Maldives and a bottle of SPF 30 was as handy as a sanitizers were in the COVID era. You were out, you were walking, you were sunscreened. We didn’t own a car. You didn’t need one because the city is 2 km long and like a kilometre wide. The only cars you’d ever see were taxi cabs or the ones owned by the really rich. The rest of the not-so-rich populace of Malé, Maldives had found other ways to travel around the island and discovered status symbols that weren’t vehicles.
A cab ride to the library would have set us back 20 Rufiyaa. Funnily enough, a cab ride to anywhere in the city would have set us back 20 Rufiyaa because the short diameter of the city had prompted its cab drivers to devise a standard fare if they were to make any profits whatsoever. Therefore, despite the merciless sun, everyone preferred to walk. Or at least that is how I left Malé, twelve years ago. Present day Malé, Maldives is probably an entirely different picture than the one I am desperately trying to paint. And there is a really good chance that you may visit the island at some point in the future and think that I am but a dramatic storyteller. Cities do that a lot, they change – tainting every memory you have of them in the process. Shedding old skins, finding comfort in new ones, every day. In that sense, all cities are “the city that never sleeps”. Then again, I am also no longer the same spectacled eight-year-old with a mushroom haircut, who left the city one day to never return again. Maybe Malé, Maldives is as skeptic of me, as I am of her. Both of us introducing ourselves, with asterisks next to our names. *Circa 2010.
20 Rufiyaa was not a lot of money in the late 2000s, but it was enough to save for an immigrant family in their first foreign country. A country with a mere thirty-minute time difference from home, but a difference, nonetheless. So, we’d walk down the narrow alleys, which were the only streets the city had to offer. Past the grocery stores with names in a language I never learnt to read, write, or speak. Down the length of the waterfront with a small brick wall on its perimeter, that I climbed every single time. The waterfront that I must have seen at least a hundred times, yet struggle to recreate in memory and therefore, in words. We walked while our foreheads glistened and our shadows lengthened, until we reached the Children’s Multimedia Library at one end of the island city of Malé, Maldives. The library had all the books my sister and I wanted to read and could read, owing to our tender ages and a lack of English reading prior to our Maldivian childhood. We found our first Geronimo Stilton on those brightly coloured bookshelves and struggled through our first Secret Seven amidst those walls. I remember a lot of books and yet there are numerous more that I have forgotten, but I won’t ever forget the Children’s Multimedia Library in Malé, Maldives. At the risk of sounding cliché, it made me into the 20-year-old that I am today.
We never incurred a late fine in those two years because that’s how often we frequented the library. I remember once, in grade three, I had borrowed a Calvin and Hobbes comic book from the library and lent it to a girl I liked, for the weekend. I had, however, grossly miscalculated the due date and thought the book was due back at the library on Monday, whereas the actual due date was Sunday (a Maldivian school weekend was Friday and Saturday). My mom was visibly stressed because an overdue fine would have tarnished the honest relationship the Vohra family shared with government institutions. It marked us as careless, as lazy, forgetful even. It was up there with the biggest reputational hits that the self-respect of a hardworking immigrant household could take. To avoid that, my mom waited outside my classroom on the second floor of my school, at 12 PM on Sunday afternoon, while I asked the girl I liked to return the book I’d so happily given her to read. The girl I liked watched as I half-snatched the book from her hands and gave it to the lady clad in a navy-blue top and sunglasses perched on her triangle head.
During lunch that day, the girl I liked, told me that she’d written a note on the last page of the Calvin and Hobbes comic book for me. She was oblivious of the fact that by now the book was already returned and restocked in one of the many shelves at the Children’s Multimedia Library. I went looking for it the next time I was there, but the book was already in a new home by then. I no longer remember the girl’s name and I doubt she remembers the note, or even the book, or even me. But I’d like to think that there still exists a Calvin and Hobbes comic book in the Children’s Multimedia Library in Malé, Maldives, with a note on the last page that proves that there were once two seven-year-olds who lived in the island city. They shared books and passed notes and giggled at teachers from their desk in class 3-I.
My mom walked to the library alone that Sunday afternoon, and then walked all the way back. Down the beach and past the stores, under the unforgiving Maldivian sun. I don’t remember what the fine for an overdue Calvin and Hobbes was back in 2009 at the Children’s Multimedia Library in Malé, Maldives but I am wondering now if it was worth the walk. Some days, when returning from the library, I would beg my mom to take a cab. Holding my legs to emphasize the pain that coursed through them. Those days she would promise me a Kinder Joy from the corner store near our building, if I walked all the way home. The thought of the white chocolate delicacy and the toy that came tucked in its oval packaging, somehow trumped the pain every time. Well almost every time. On days that my legs actually did hurt, my mom would call for a cab. A Kinder Joy cost 10 Rufiyaa. A cab cost 20. The 10 Rufiyaa difference was not a lot of money in the late 2000s in Malé, Maldives, but it was enough to save for an immigrant family in their first foreign country.
That’s the economical side of it. Maybe life is an Amar Chitra Katha comic, and every story has a moral, and the money was never a factor, but it was the values my mom wanted to teach me. The work ethic she wanted to instil in six-year-old me, much like the reading habit she helped me develop, that I gradually shed as I changed like the island city of Male, Maldives. Maybe life isn’t an Amar Chitra Katha comic and mothers are superheroes who can tell when their boy is tired and when he isn’t. I wonder if Mummy bought herself a Kinder Joy on the walk back home from the library that Sunday afternoon, when I forgot the due date on a Calvin and Hobbes comic book at the Children’s Multimedia Library in Malé, Maldives.
I just went from my bedroom to Malé and back here all in span of 5 minutes.
beautiful, i want to visit Malé just for the library to try to find the book.
kinderjoys>>>