A lighthearted story for the holiday season, which would effortlessly qualify for the "plainly mad" category. While places (and possibly people) like those written about in this story must exist in real life, here they are purely products of my imagination, and bear no resemblance to what I have seen and heard.
The city of Channallur in South India was what the travel books called a "bustling metropolis". It had several million residents, a couple of factories set up by assorted multinational companies, a dozen colleges, apartment buildings of every hue and shape - and two Foreign Libraries. These, the Imperial (British) Library and the American Library, were held in high regard by Channallur’s citizens.