The fact that I was in Bangalore last week should not come as a surprise to anyone other than those of you who have consigned this newsletter to the spam folder. (Such people would do well to remember that Lord sees everything and justice will be served in the court of the Almighty.)
A trip to Bangalore is, of course, incomplete without a trip to Blossoms. Any amount of time I spend in that glorious bookstore seems insufficient. After numerous visits spread over many years, I have not yet been able to satisfactorily explore all the nooks and crannies of its three storeys crammed with books of every imaginable ilk. Which, come to think of it, is not a bad thing since I have something new to look forward to every time I go there.
I have always been enamoured by bookstores. My earliest memory of a bookstore is one that was located in the south-west corner of New Market, Calcutta1 - I can’t quite remember its name. This place supplied me with the first book I owned: a Tintin comic (Land of Black Gold). I suppose I was given to ripping things as a child because my mother had deemed it prudent to have the comic book hardbound: protection rendered in a pale pink cardboard cover with a large white hand-written label. In case you’re wondering, let me lay your mind at rest. Yes, I ripped the cardboard cover to shreds.
After we moved to Calcutta in the early 90s, I became familiar with the giddy extravaganza that was বইমেলা (Boi Mela) - the famous Book Fair typically held every year in January. At the time, the Book Fair would sprawl over the many acres of Maidan2 with hundreds of temporary bookstalls. Maps would be offered at the entrance to help intrepid pint-sized explorers, like myself, chart the most efficient route between these stalls: which were simple wooden huts with only the façade painted (and containing the occasional glass window) to attract customers, while their leeward walls remained starkly bare, away from the public gaze.
The most remarkable feature of these stalls were the wooden floorboards, which were built a foot or so above the uneven ground to serve as a stable base. These floorboards would creak under the weight of the multitudes these huts contained, but never give way; always straining but holding steady as if aware that they needed to support the dreams of thousands. Stepping up from the dusty Maidan ground and onto the floorboards of a bookstall felt like entering an ephemeral place where your feet (quite literally) didn’t touch the ground. A place of countless possibilities and stories, of adventures and discoveries, of joy. A place filled with books.
The first time I cheated on traditional bookstores was when I went to ‘Landmark’, sometime in the early 2000s. Landmark was one of those chain retail outlets (a pre-cursor to ‘Crossword’) which sold books, toys, music CDs and the like. It sparkled with modernity and overwhelmed you with the sheer size of its collection. To my pre-teen eyes, it seemed as if the entire floor of a shopping mall was filled with rows and rows of books. Soon, book buying expeditions meant going to shopping malls and trips to the quaint little bookshops in New Market dwindled.
Over the years, I made a few half-hearted attempts to rekindle my relationship with traditional bookshops, largely driven out of guilt and a fading sense of nostalgia. But it never lasted. The chain stores were too convenient, too available and I could never wean myself off them. Now, ironically, even the chain stores have been spurned and cast aside, as I buy books (almost) exclusively on Amazon. In fact, the only time I visit physical bookshops anymore is when I am travelling.
Travelling, to me, is inexorably linked to reading (and buying) books. When I was young, I would eagerly look forward to the train journeys every time we went on a family vacation. Apart from the charms of travelling by train (which I still enjoy), train journeys were always prefaced by book purchases; often bought from the Wheeler carts that would languidly patrol the platforms as we waited for our train to arrive. Now, even this has changed. At some point, travelling began to mean less about enjoying the journey and more about urgency, about reaching your destination in the shortest time possible. In this world, I frequent airports more often than train stations. The Wheeler carts adorned with magazines have been replaced by airport terminal kiosks selling self-help books stacked between neck-pillows and chocolate. There is a lot more on offer, but a lot less time to appreciate any of it. But I digress.
I was talking about how, of late, I visit bookstores only when I am travelling. There is something exotic about discovering (or re-visiting) bookshops in other cities, and books purchased from these places also become souvenirs. They carry two stories: the first is the story contained within its pages, the one the author intended you to read; and the other is the one which holds meaning only for you, your own memories of the city, the street, the shop, all inextricably linked now, to the book you hold in your hand.
I have never felt this more than when I visited Atlantis Books, an ethereally beautiful bookstore in Santorini, Greece.
I mean, look at how pretty this place is. I can come up with many reasons why I buy books but this was the only time I bought a book to hold onto the memory of a bookshop. And that’s fine, I think. There can never be a bad reason to buy a book.
P.S.: Writing this has reminded me how much I loved, still love, visiting traditional, stand-alone bookstores. Sadly, such shops are becoming increasingly rare and are an endangered species. Maybe this year, I will try harder to renounce Amazon and buy books from the places that need the business to survive. Perhaps you should do the same. Because a world without bookstores, can hardly be a world worth living in.
This memory pre-dates the English re-naming of the city as ‘Kolkata’. In Bengali though, it has always been কলকাতা (Kolkata).
In the past decade or so, its location has shifted a few times - I think the current edition is going to be held in Salt Lake.
The book fair sounds amazing, what a beautiful memory.
Loved it , will follow your footsteps and stop buying from Amazon