They tear at their hair, gazing wide eyed into the oblivion, their faces stiff with the incessant
turmoil…....no, not a sanitarium, just a typical scene at the library reading room.
After fighting through another page, I stretch back on my chair, panning around the hall. And as
they say, even staring on empty walls sometimes becomes more tempting than studying. As I
look around the most despised room in the college, I cannot help but admire its magnificence.
An almost colossal hall, illuminated with numerous tube lights and windows reaching as high as
the roof. A roof almost two floors high, studded with 20 ceiling fans, and under each fan, a
wooden study table surrounded by 6 chairs. But even more magnificent is the miscellany of its
occupants.
The most conspicuous tenants are the ones poring unblinking over their text, the so called
nerds. They sit on one of the six chairs but occupy half the table with their bags and books.
They are the only ones who frequent the library even when there are no exams around. Equally
outcaste, they find the place the most befitting habitat. They frown upon anyone who enters
the reading room and does not belong to their fraternity. It is their place of worship and can do
without those noisy nobodies who come and disrupt its peace.
Then there are the first timers, towed this far by their nerdy roommates. At first they pan wide
eyed around the room, raking in its splendor. They feel like they have discovered their room of
requirements which will provide for all their needs. But soon they start realizing that the room
is alive, and it hates them with all its will and is trying in all its power to choke them out of the
room. Words may injure a person, but silence can suffocate. You soon perceive their uneasiness
as they flutter their pages, shift in their seats and glance around pleading for help. And then the
books are shut, the chairs pushed back and the man marches out of the room, never to come
back again.
Then there are people like me, who in the light of the day (read non –exam time) utter all sorts
of bullshit about the place, make fun of the nerds and beware the juniors of the haunted
building. But come the night, we don our dark capes and scramble in the dark through routes
unheard and roads unseen, tiptoeing inside the sanctuary and heaving a sigh of relief on not
being discovered. For no matter how much you hate the room and how much the room hates
you, in the war against the words, it’s our knight in the shining armor. We shut the world
outside through our earphones, and together we struggle through the piles of syllabus.
Time and again the room has bailed us out, when all our friends, our dirty hostel rooms and
even our laptops join the forces with the enemy. So whenever you are panicked out of your
brains, with only two hours left and tons of syllabus waiting, when everything and everyone
else tries to pull you away from the books, when your brain haunts you with images of you
sitting clueless through the exams……come to the silent sanitarium and have your peace.
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