I try very hard not to be sentimental. I know that there isn’t much point in it because when I read a sentimental piece, I am generally annoyed and often feel the need to go and have a wash. But I want to talk for a moment about the time when I yearned to buy books and couldn’t. My father thought it was unwise to allow his children to buy books that they would inevitably outgrow. So he got us library memberships. This only made it worse since every book we read and loved, we wanted to own. All this made us into surreptitious book-buyers. (I wonder now whether that had been his intention in the first place.)
We saved almost all the money we got to buy books. Almost? Well, I was still addicted to toffees. Then my sister put me straight, “Right, you’ll buy a toffee and you’ll eat it and tomorrow it will pass out of you. But if you save the money and buy a book you can read it again and again and it is yours.” I gave up toffees and each time I didn’t buy them, I kept thinking of the Gerald Durrell or the Agatha Christie or the Alistair MacLean I wanted. (Yes, I know. But I was 10 and that was what I was reading. And you know what? I’m still reading Durrell and Christie. So there.)
I still remember the time I went to Strand Book Stall in Mumbai for the first time. I was a literal child so I thought we would be standing out on the street and peering into a stall. I was delighted when it turned out to be a bookshop and there was an entire children’s section. I must have been around 12 at the time and I thought: I don’t want to read children’s books, so I refused to climb to the mezzanine and poked around in the ground floor where my father was also browsing.
He bought a couple of books, exchanged cheerful greetings with Mr. Shanbhag who was wearing a double-breasted suit and looking like he belonged in Foyle’s or some such place and then because he must have felt the pressure of our greed, we were taken to Smokers’ Corner. My father lit a cigarette and my sister and I began the industrious work of finding the books we loved of the authors we loved.
Second chances
Mr. Suleman Botawala watched over everything from the stairs with a benign eye because this was truly a corner. The bookshop lived in the hallway of Botawala Mansion and there was even a circulating library in a corner. My sister bought These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer and I found a Peter O’Donnell, Pieces of Modesty , and we got into a double-decker bus, found window seats and began reading on the way home.
When I started tutoring students in mathematics, it was only to feed my habit. I had discovered other places: New & Secondhand Book Centre and Victoria Circulating Library and Bookshop and the streets around Flora Fountain and the arcades around it. Most of my books came pre-read and pre-owned and not pre-loved enough to merit keeping. Someone had put them out on the street but they had now made their way back into another home. (This is what you must do with books you outgrow; give them a chance to be savoured and loved again. Give them away or sell them. Give them a second chance at love.)
When I got older and started travelling, I discovered the delights of other cities and other bookshops, the fabulous Bookworm and Blossom in Bengaluru; the Khan Market bookshops in Delhi; Murugan Old Book Shop in Chennai and then I got even older and discovered that the bookshops of my youth are closing down one by one.
You all know the reason. There’s the Internet and the pleasures of the screen.
I think it’s simple. It’s us. All of us. We abandoned bookshops along the way. I went to Strand Book Shop when it was closing down and bought some books for old times’ sake. Quite by chance, I also dropped by at Smokers’ Corner and was greeted by bibliomortia: my coinage for the smell of old books. I bought a couple of books, again for old times’ sake and promised myself I would return. I did. And the shutters were down. I don’t know if it was forever or it was just a day in the life of a bookshop. I suspect it might be the former; I suspect it is the latter.
But there is always hope. We have two new bookshops in my city, Wayword & Wise (curated by Virat Chandhok) and KitabKhana (run by Jagath, who was once the second-in-command at Strand). We still have People’s Book House and the roads around Flora Fountain...
One last story. I went there and was greeted like an old friend. I bought several books and then one of the men came up with a copy of a book, Bollywood Posters , which I had written and Sheena Sippy had designed. He said, “Please sign?”
And so I did a book-signing on the road.
These are the real heroes of the bookshop and the book trade. The villains are looking at themselves in their black mirrors.
The author tries to think and write and translate in the cacophony of Mumbai.
