Jayaseelan passed on the gift of reading to his grand-niece, Christyana Rose, who says, “My granduncle was a great influence on me. He has a good collection of books at home.” She took the baby steps into the world of words and illustrations at her granduncle’s house, but later, the school library became a favourite spot. Christyana’s meagre pocket money wasn’t enough for her to buy the books at the school fairs. But she would visit the school library with time-worn rooftiles old, dust-slathered stacks of books, bearing the musty smells of the withered pages, where she would go with her ID card anytime and pick anything she liked. She recalls, “I was still moving around in the circles of Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton. I had to go to college to graduate from children’s literature and go to The Da Vinci Code. I started with Dan Brown and then went to Jeffrey Archer.” She skipped the romance genre, even when the entire city was hooked to Twilight.
In college, she had memberships in libraries across the city, but the American Library, British Council Library, and Connemara were the most affordable ones, she says. Calling the British Council Library a hub for book discussion, she says, “They’d print out the book scheduled for discussion, give it to us, or send an email of an excerpt.”