Between the covers in Mumbra

Mumbra resident Naheed Butt grew up being told that books were bad for girls. “Whenever the Urdu periodicals were delivered to our house, my grandmother would hide them under her mattress, so we wouldn’t get influenced by all the dangerous ideas,” she smiles.

Not to be outdone, Naheed would sneak the pages into her bedroom and pore over them with her sister. “Being told that I couldn’t read made me even more determined to try,” recalls the feisty eighteen year old. The same spirit led her, a few weeks ago, to the Rehnuma reading club and library centre, where she has been imbibing — and spreading — all the ‘dangerous ideas’ her grandmother so feared.

“We started the library five years ago when we realised that local women had no space where they could go to read, or just talk,” says Kausar Ansari, administrator with the Aawaz-e-Niswaan, the organisation that runs the centre. Its location in Mumbra — a Muslim dominated suburb near Thane — is no accident.

“Here, girls tend to grow up, get married and spend their lives in the same restricted circle. Through reading, we hoped to introduce them to the wide world outside.”

Members of the one-room library can access over 5,000 books, mostly in Urdu, but also in Hindi and English. While the most popular titles are Pakistani pulp romances, the mix on the racks is freewheeling — Virginia Woolfe rubs spines with Little Women, while Sadat Hasan Manto is wedged comfortably between Marx and Marquez. The second room, with its walls painted in cheerful colours by the girls, is where the Rehnuma book club holds its monthly meetings.

“Not all of us can talk about what we read at home,” explains Kausar. “My brother, for instance, can’t read, and my mother isn’t interested. The club is a way for us to discuss how a particular book made us feel.”

The authors picked by the group so far include the incendiary Manto and the elegant Quratul Ain Haider. This month, they are reading Ismat Chughtai, whose tongue-in-cheek digs at patriarchy have won the girls’ hearts.

“She seems to understand what it’s like to live like us,” says Hina Sheikh. “Many of her characters could be people I know in Mumbra.” Even the controversial Quilt, describing a lesbian relationship, seemed familiar to Tabassum Khan. “It’s about the loneliness of the woman whose husband doesn’t give her any love,” she explains. “It’s the same as they showed in the movie Girlfriend,” she adds, “but Ismat is more real.” 

The parallels with their own lives come naturally. “Many members of the library came to us through our counseling sessions for legal or domestic problems,” says Kausar.

“When they join the readers club, they bring their own experiences to the sessions.” For others, the club is the first step to changing their lives. “If I hadn’t come here, I would have been happy to have stayed at home and got married like everyone else,” says Rabia Siddiqui.

“Now, I want to be a writer like Mahadevi Varma.” She carries her essentials — a notebook and pen — wherever she goes, because a writer “has to be always ready for inspiration.”

“All I know is that it’s never too late to start,” declares Mehrun Nisa, a cheerful thirty-something who came to the centre for literacy classes and has ended up addicted to books.

Her daily afternoon visits to the library have led to a running feud with her mother in law. “She says — is this your age for learning new tricks? Or are you training to be some hot-shot officer?” chuckles Mehrun. Her coursemate, Reshma Sheikh, was recently discovered by her mother reading Premchand under the covers at 3am.

As a punishment, she has been forbidden from watching any of her favourite TV shows. “As if I care... they’re boring anyway,” she says, turning up her nose with new-found disdain.

Besides the books, the Rehnuma library offers women the rare commodity of an open space, where they can shake off the social gaze for a while. Burqas come off the minute girls walk across the threshold, and posters on the wall invite applications for summer modules in theatre and dance.

“Everything we can’t do outside, we do in here,” says Gulshan Khan. Gulshan was part of a group that put up a cultural event on a local stage recently. The programme included songs and plays about gender issues, as well as monologues from their favourite writer, Ismat, (whom they all refer to by her first name, like an old friend).

After the show, the organisers requested the press and the men to leave, since the girls wanted to dance. This, as Kausar points out, was a big deal in Mumbra.

“We used to be like that — too scared to raise our eyes while walking on the road,” says Naheed. “But now, we can argue with anyone in public, and the men are scared of us.”

As she pulls on her veil and prepares to go out, she adds happily, “It’s good; they should be nervous. Even when they read this article, they should go — Mumbra ki larkiyan… oh my God!”
 k_taran@dnaindia.net