Khwaabghar

Making up for lost time

I’m trying to make up for lost time, trying to wrap my questions in conversations to keep them safe. I am opening up my house to let it live up to its potential.

For a few years now, I have found myself at the centre of conversations where words flew past me like insects.

I’m sorry?

Which book is that?

When did that happen?

I had no idea.

There’s so much I didn’t understand that I stopped trying in company. I would make an effort on my own, amassing information for retention, like I would for a test. Because that’s what we were taught no? You learn alone, and then you prove that you know. If you don’t, nod along and google later. But it gets tiring along the way, kind of like Joey after partially reading the encyclopaedia.

There were exactly two books in my house when I was growing up, You Can Win by Shiv Khera and The Way of the Wizard by Deepak Chopra. Not an enviable collection. Unlike most of the willing English Literature graduates I studied with in Delhi, I did not grow up on a healthy dose of study rooms, public libraries, encouraging schools and peers, reader parents/siblings, or just information about books, culture, art. I was starting from a different point in the race. It took another degree and some growing up to realise that that’s normal, and that it’s not a race. I profess my lack of awareness now, asking questions as soon as I lose track.

No I don’t know that song, yes I understand everybody has heard it.

No who’s that director?

Is that a Russian name?

If you could spell that for me please?

As COVID sailed and raged through 2020 and 2021, I lost the connections and the energy that kept me going. I went off social media during the first and then the second wave. With that, the last spaces for conversation, engagement, entertainment and knowledge delivered through people were lost too. It was a choice between triggers, sensory overload, and disconnect. I disconnected. But I wasn’t alone in this. The undercurrent of distance and pervasive tiredness ran through my conversations with friends. It was in April 2021, at the peak of the second wave in India that I started nurturing a childhood dream again, and it came to be in July 2021.

I don’t feel ready for social media just yet, but I’m not willing to fall off the map. So this time, I am trying to build a smaller, more manageable space where we don’t have to choose. A space to learn and grow without being overwhelmed, and without getting caught in faceless dialogue with little space for empathy. So welcome to Khwaabghar, a small and slow Community Library in Gurgaon, which I am running from my veranda. You see, it has to be a library because I need to make up for lost time :)

Subscribe to stay updated about what we’re up to.