Books
by the Street
By Shoaib Hashmi
So Lahore is off on one of its
tacks again, and I must admit this time it is a
most welcome one. You see we already have all of
three 'Food Streets' in addition to the old 'Paan
Street', if you accept the name for the 'Paan Gali'
and the 'Sirion-Payon Waala Bazaar'. That is the
'Street of the Heads and Trotters' and it is inside
'Mochi Gate' and don't try mucking with me because
I come from there.
Well the good news is that now we are to have a
'Book Street' on Thornton Road, which as I said
is most welcome -- and a bit peculiar. Because the
initial announcement said that the authorities had
already been able to line up forty bookshops --
and all of two thousand books! That, according to
my calculation comes to a total of fifty books per
bookshop, which, by any criterion is less that the
amount of fried fish Haji Sardar sells each day
in the food street. But, as a friend said in defense,
"May be them are Big books"!
It does put one in mind of how the bookshop scene
has changed in the city. I am not complaining about
the numbers because I can remember a time when there
were much fewer shops, but the city was smaller
then, and the shops were different! Like there was
the 'Ideal Book Shop' on the corner of the Mall
and Anarkali, and it is like a half forgotten dream.
They had elegant bookcases made of Burma Teak, and
all over there were leather covered sofas where
you could sit and browse through a book -- and if
you did, an attendant would come round and discreetly
switch on a shaded light behind you to make you
welcome. If you couldn't afford to buy a book, you
could sit and read it there, because there was a
sign which said, "The purpose of a book is
to be read". And if you couldn't finish it
in one day, you put a special tasselled bookmark,
provided by the store, in it and they wouldn't sell
it. I remember Prof. Safdar Mir once raising a fuss
with the management because they inadvertently sold
a tome he wasn't finished with; and they apologized
and arranged for another copy! That was civilized
bookselling with a heart in the right place.
Like there used to be -- maybe still is -- 'The
Shakespeare Bookshop' in Paris; and if they saw
that you were hanging around and seemed to know
your way through the books, they'd send you a cup
of coffee and a croissant. Then we came upon this
old bookshop in Highgate in London. This old man
sat surrounded by so many old and wonderful books,
all obviously read many times over. He too sent
us cups of tea, and we selected a few books and
took them to the counter, and he smiled a gentle
smile and shook his head and said sorry the books
were not for sale!
He had spent his working life on plantations in
South America, and these were all the books he had
collected in a lifetime of reading. Now he was retired
and he liked being surrounded by his books, so he'd
opened a bookshop, but soon realized he couldn't
bear to part with any of them, so he didn't. Any
stray customer was an excuse to give him a cuppa
and a little chat and that was it. I seem to recall
that eventually he did give us an old Bible or something,
but that is not the point. The point is that he'd
not merely read the books, he'd learnt!
The 'Ideal' is no more and has been supplanted by
one of your usual supermarkets. We did the best
we could and bought up the teakwood bookshelves
for the library at Government College, so all is
not lost. But most is. There are dozens of bookshops
in town -- and they are all chockfull of computer
manuals and 'How to...' books. There are also the
more fashionable stores that call themselves bookshops,
but all they have got are oodles of cards! Cards
for birthdays and valentines and for brothers and
sisters and mothers-in-law. Also chocolates and
ice creams.
If you want to buy an actual book you go to one
of those basements where they get them in containers
and sell them by the weight. Or you go to the side
streets of Anarkali and rummage through the second
hand bookshops. On Sundays they spread out on to
the footpaths, which are called sidewalks! So it
does the heart good to see that someone wants to
set up a 'Book Street'. I think it is Raina in 'Arms
and the Man' who crows to Bluntschelli that her
father has a library in the house -- and in the
library there is even 'A Book'!
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