Bookshop Memories in a Changing India

Courtesy of Jairaj Singh A customer at the ‘Fact & Fiction’ bookstore in New Delhi.

In the summer of 1984, two years before I was born, my father, Ajit Vikram Singh opened a small corner bookshop, Fact & Fiction, in South Delhi’s Vasant Vihar area, opposite a decrepit cinema hall that would screen films like ‘The Sex Life of Animals’ to a packed audience. Nearly 30 years later, it’s disheartening to see him disillusioned with the Indian book industry.

A descendant of a royal family, my father was brought up in old, decadent fashions and with a pet elephant in the house. He got a degree in science from Delhi’s St Stephen’s College, but veered toward he art of curating, collecting, and making a life selling carefully selected books.

I grew up in a world unlike his, one filled with books. When I was a baby, he would carry me in a tiny basket to the bookstore. One day, he found me crawling on the floor and sinking my teeth on books lying on the floor. “You literally grew up biting into the word,” he chuckled.

In the early 1990s, I would see my father diligently scan catalogues of international publishing houses, highlighting titles he wanted for the bookstore. He knew where a book in the store was kept because he would stack them himself.

“A bookstore isn’t about keeping books you like to read,” he would say. “It’s about filling it with books that people will want to pick out and buy.” This was perhaps his first lesson in selling books.

It was neither a luxurious nor a profitable trade, and my friends at school would wonder how my father managed to pay my school fee. My lit! erary-minded colleagues, however, would imagine the store as a retreat filled with days of quiet reading and fancy thoughts of opening their own bookstores.

My father’s days at the bookstore are still punctuated by visits from a bewildering cast of characters, fewer than before. There will be sophisticated gentlemen seeking details of an international best seller; a hassled aunt wanting a birthday gift option for a prodigal niece seeking a “nice” book; a television celebrity hanging around the aisles, hoping to be recognized and drop names of writers she has interviewed; the vague intellectual who proffers instant dismissive reviews of books others pick out while he thumbs through another book he wouldn’t buy; and people with neither the recollection of the title nor the name of the publisher, yet persistently describing a book they want to purchase.

Over the years, I’ve watched my father become a solitary man who spends his days manning the store from a squeaky chair behind a tiny des along with the help of a manager. He knows the regulars well â€" writers, scholars, journalists - who years ago walked into the store as awkward young men and have grown up to be people whose books found a place on his bookshelves.

Courtesy of Jairaj Singh Ajit Vikram Singh.

My father shares a unique rapport with them. He knows who reads graphic novels, he knows who seeks philosophy, and he knows who wants science fiction. There are some who make an annual pilgrimage to the bookshop, for whom he’ll disappear into the hidden attic, and fish out a book he has been saving for them. He would even read unpublished manuscripts. In a ruthless, brash city like Delhi, here was an independent bookstor! e where y! ou could openly talk about literature, religion and politics.

Over the years, my father has come to acquire a reputation of being an eccentric bookseller. A few Sundays ago, I was sharing a cup of coffee with him at the bookshop, when a man walked in and asked for the “self-help books” section.

“Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose,” my father replied. Another time, a man asked him the same question, and he was pointed toward the “religion and philosophy” section.

What upsets him is the way people treat books. It bothers him when he sees the corners get turned when someone tries to shove a book back in its place on the shelf without looking. It hurts when people walk in and complain how small the bookstore is and then don’t look at his books. It annoys when people insist on heavy discounts for a $10 book, but wear shirts that would cost $50.

Delhi, he often says, is a city with more writers than readers. “Books are not written because the world needs to read another one” he once told me a long time ago. “It’s because writers feel the world must read their books.”

We were somewhere in North Delhi at a used bookstore. I was sitting on a pile of books, sipping a cold drink, my hands caked in book dust, wondering how on earth my father had found this decrepit place and why people feel the need to write books.

There was a time when my father would skulk around the city, forever on the lookout for old and out-of-print books. He knew every nook and cranny of the city where he could find them and sometimes would take me along on these intrepid “treasure hunts”. My father would get a lot of leads from the pavement and second-hand booksellers.

In turn, he would help them sift through their stash and lend a friendly ear to their troubles. He also had a knack of mending old books, ravished by termites and silver fish, by treating them with spirits, and selling them for a small price. Today, like independent bookstores, the pavement and second-hand! booksell! ers are also finding it hard to keep books and survive.

A chain bookstore the size of a food court that opened much later in the same marketplace openly declared that they will have him shut by the end of the year. They couldn’t.

In the past few years, independent booksellers like Fact & Fiction around the world are fighting to stay in  business. The flurry of chains, online retail, and now e-readers and tablets are gradually edging the corner bookstore out. But the bigger dragon to slay is the skyrocketing rents of commercial spaces in recent times, spitting fire on the ground on which they stand. Had my brother and I been in school today, perhaps my father would not have been able to afford the fees.

Many claim there is little or no future for small corner bookstores. But it isn’t books that will suddenly cease to exist if the corner bookstore goes. The glut of shopping malls swelling on the Indian cityscape house outlets of a chain bookstore offering stationery, stuffed toys, DVDs,and books at a discount.

Online book retailing is no longer a mere threat. Earlier this month, Flipkart.com sold one million books in a single day. According to a Nielsen survey, it occupied an average 40 to 45 percent share of the book trade in 2013. Vying for the same space is Amazon, which has just entered the Indian market.

Courtesy of Jairaj Singh The ‘Fact & Fiction’ bookstore in Vasant Vihar, New Delhi.

A day will dawn when a section of readers might miss the experience of walking into a corner bookstore, recognizing a few faces, stumbling upon an unexpected book, long for the civility of a conversation outside a bookstore, crave for a bookseller whose approvin! g smile o! n the purchase of a copy of Man Without Qualities could be the beginning of a beautiful literary friendship.

Few might remember the smell of a bookstore in the morning after the shutters are lifted. And, who would tell me the story a writer confessed about skipping lunch to save enough for a particular book he wanted from Fact & Fiction?

A bookstore is a sea of stories. India needs to support its independent bookstores, perhaps now more than ever, for the same reason it seeks to preserve its architectural heritage.

I am often surprised how a tiny bookstore in a market dominated by a cinema, garish bars, and garment stores attracted and inspired a generation of writers and scholars.

A good bookstore, however, can’t survive on its lore.

My father and others who run independent bookstores can no longer get access to the books they were once known for. Their shelves are going barren by the day as they are rejecting the mass-market pulp fiction and the lowbrow offerings thepublishers are forcing their way.

At a recent literature festival, a writer who has sold more than close to two million copies of a truly mediocre novel was introduced to Vikram Seth. “So, what do you like to read,” asked Mr. Seth. “Actually sir, I don’t like to read. I just like to tell stories,” he answered.

For years, my father has been dealing with inept marketing people of publishing houses to keep his selection eclectic. Today they are the ones responsible for bringing books to India and are turning their backs on him. It’s sad because they are only concerned about ordering books in bulk to meet sales margins â€"  Books that are tried-and-tested, formula-driven drivel, found on international bestseller lists. Books they can’t go wrong on excel sheets.

Every day independent bookshops around the world are shutting down. Booksellers like my father are being swept out of the book trade. An evening is not far when books will close on corner bookstores like his and th! e blues h! e softly plays will forever stop.

Jairaj Singh is the editor of Time Out, Delhi.