THE Pantheon Road, they say, was once the haunt of fashionable Englishmen and women who wished to promenade in the City of Madras — and obviously, they also felt the need for a serious application of the intellect, which was why the Connemara Library was born in 1890.
A noble edifice, that one: stacks upon stacks of books, periodicals and papers came from all over the country to reside in its hallowed halls — but perhaps many didn’t quite see it for what it was.
Being a regular visitor of dank halls is my pastime — so it’s no surprise that I’ve visited the Connemara’s hallowed portals often, especially the ground floor. Years ago, a deeply shadowed hall contained a stubbly pencil and register, and you stepped into three or four anterooms that gradually facilitated your entry into one that held books from every imaginable subject. Men draped over rickety chairs around archaic tables while others lurked behind long-forgotten shelves of biographies.
Last week, I shook off rainwater droplets and stepped into the Connemara again. This time, I was greeted by brightly lit tube lights that chased away shadows. The rooms were airy; computers had replaced old, fading name cards that had numbers like CVH6756 on them.
Helpful assistants led you to the DTP section; and the old hall is now full of impossibly long stretches of wooden desks and evenly distributed chairs. Men still sleep over them and lurk in corners.
But the lure of good books is all-powerful, as I watch an avid bookworm yank Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited off the shelf. I guess Connemara has always had the best of an era long-gone — you just had to be able look in the right places.
