MUMBAI, INDIA — You get down at Churchgate Station consumed by an intellectual itch that hasn't surfaced in weeks, even months. It's a golden opportunity to add value to yourself. Walking in a lane off Marine Lines, you see your destination.

Half-hidden by walls of sand-stuffed gunnysacks, evidenced only by their muzzles and bayonets sticking out, soldiers are ready to fire. But their hidden right hands hold bidis and their eyes rest on the unsuspecting bosoms of girls chatting during a recess from the nearby polytechnic college. The guards yawn and doze in the afternoon heat.

You enter and are stopped at the heavily barricaded gates, for no apparent reason. There is no one in front of you in the line. Hell, there is no line.

Then a stern face peers out and looks at you questioningly, frisking you with furtive glances.

"General Section," you say. And the face disappears again. You wonder if the password was wrong. Two years later, or so it seems, you hear the loud clanking of levers and screeching of hinges as if an ancient pyramid's treasure vault is being opened. You are let in, only to find yourself the subject of microscopic scrutiny — through a rather sinister-looking X-ray chamber. They lady cop behind the screen now knows that you are not wearing any underwear, whatever the reasons be (in this case, the delinquent cleaning lady).

Then you are stripped of all things electronic, metallic and generally suspicious. Like house keys, ballpoint pens and dignity.

In your elemental form, you present yourself at the hallowed desk and ask for a guest receipt for Rs. 20 ($.40 US) so you can leaf through some American newspapers, magazines not available on stands, journals of your specific scholarly interest (that you cannot photocopy), and stare longingly at the books you are not authorized to borrow.

Welcome, dear Reader, to the General Information Library, housed inside the American Information Resource Centre in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay.

And you thought it was the Pentagon.

Would you be to blame if you harbor thoughts, albeit extremely transient, of blowing the hell out of it with a stick of C4? All you wanted was to look at Lewis Lapham's "Notebook" in the new Harper's, dammit.

Okay, maybe a gander at the fiction in New Yorker and then a bite of The Atlantic Monthly and the Utne Reader while you're at it. Even then, 40 minutes in the merciless Indian sun, the hostile glares of Indian guards thinking they're New England WASPs simply because their employers are, their undeniable trace of racial superiority (for chrissake!), the trails of irritating sweat down your sternum, a sincere examination of your private parts — all this rattle even the most patient of people.

"Reading is a gift of time, and it's a gift the reader makes to the text." Thus spake William Germano, in an article in the Chronicle Review. It is a gift you, being the under-privileged brown person, make every few weeks to the texts that are produced by the United States of America, even if you say so yourself. And if you could buy some old issues of the aforementioned journals at second-hand stalls outside, you couldn't care less about the American library and its curious brand of racism.

Let's not even get into what you face once you sit down in the reading room. Some old pseudo-scholar is telling his protégé the great things he has accomplished in his life, how venerable he is and how he predicted the current political climate 20 years ago — in a loud voice that attracts the scornful glances of many innocent victims like you, until you take the onus and remind him that he is not standing in a mall, and that you are only selectively, not pathologically, deaf. After which you can try and barely clear some space on the table to place your intended reading, dwarfed by the skyscrapers of strategically placed leather-bound volumes — outpourings of American think-tanks labeled thus — "War on Terror," "The Nuclear Threat," "Osama Bin Laden," "The Middle-East Imperative."

In addition to that, the librarian is conducting a workshop for about 15 young students from high school on the methods of getting education in the United States — TOEFL, GRE, GMAT, even as your mind echoes the recent headlines declaring severe cuts in visas to Indian nationals intending to do business, study, or visit loved ones abroad. Because two of the accused in the Sept. 11 tragedy had applied for student visas, the article said.

Granted that some gunners shot and ran away at the Calcutta center a few months ago, so prudence and cautionary measures were in order. Also, that a general sense of paranoia has prevailed after the Sept. 11 tragedy.

Your point is simple.

Aggressive propaganda through libraries, and converting libraries into bases, will only serve to further that paranoia. It is also the best way to alienate and antagonize the people who are actually trying to make sense of it all and think rationally, a quality that largely comes through study, reading and introspection. Books are expensive, American ones even more so, and libraries are the last refuge of the man with modest means and inclination towards intellectual pursuit.

It is sad to see that what once was the American Centre Library is now only a monument to precautionary insanity. Every time you pass by, you can hear it whisper to some terrorist's instinct: "psst — blow me up!"

E-mail Rohit Gupta at fadereu@gmail.com.

— graphic by Carl Durbridge (carl@fuzzynet.co.uk)