THE BOOK KEEPERS OF PURANI DILLI

One morning in May, 1987, Mohammad Naeem lay in bed for almost an hour, well after everyone in his Old Delhi home had started their day. He hadn’t slept well. The night had been full of thoughts — about the four-day curfew in his area; the people around him and all that they had been through; how the local and national leaders he looked up to didn’t seem to be doing much; and how his neighbourhood seemed stuck in a time warp.

During the curfew and the communal riots that had preceded it, Naeem and seven friends — all in their 20s, all from business families — volunteered to arrange for essential commodities for the neighbourhood. With nothing to do the rest of the day, they played cards in a stuffy room inside a tiny lane on Pahari Imli, one of the many hillocks in the Walled City.

Naeem thought of that room, and how it was rarely used, and a plan began to take shape in his head.

“The curfew was a moment of awakening for us,” says Naeem, now 54. “It changed something within us. Made us want to change the fate of our locality. We thought there was no better way to do this than by opening a library.”

In 1990, the group registered as the Delhi Youth Welfare Association (DYWA) and got to work. They started out with just the newspapers and magazines from their homes, then added a few acquisitions from the Sunday books market at Darya Ganj.

They hadn’t even thought of a name. Abdul Hadi, a resident who was then a clerk with Jamia Millia Islamia University, suggested they name it after the revered Islamic scholar Shah Waliullah.

As word spread, though, scholars, academics and clerics began donating. The books came in backpacks, on bicycle carriers, in cycle rickshaws, tied up in cloth; new, jumbled, torn.

Today, the Hazrat Shah Waliullah Public Library is a local institution, home to about 20,000 books, including rare works in Urdu, Persian and Arabic. And when the original eight decided to revamp the nowcrumbling space, a grateful community stepped forward to help.