Leafing through Daryaganj’s Sunday book bazaar
The books arrive on rickshaws and autos, in Maruti Omnis and 800s, and burst upon the pavement in rubble-like heaps, or quietly lay claim to separate portions of the available earth.
Daryaganj’s Sunday book bazaar isn’t firmly established until after 10 in the morning but it begins practising its charms from three hours before. The wide road is traffic-free, the crowd not yet gathered, and the day’s stock is virgin. Slowly and suddenly you find yourself entangled in a careless pile, lost in the smell of old paper, warmed by the lovely words in which a book is gifted. No matter how far you dig, the curious book keeps turning up.
[By the time you reach out for the kachauris, the place is milling with purpose. Soon the ground is a swamp of textbooks, ‘competition books’, software programming manuals, and a bizarre crop of religious, spiritual and astrological guides. The small collection from a
Salisbury library is irretrievable among the pirated bestsellers rapidly colonising the pavement. But what magazines inhabit our planet! At one stall I counted 11 extremely expensive looking magazines on interior decoration alone.
One plump Punjabi manning a huge collection of Coelhos and Wallaces, swept away a flood of sweat from his forehead onto a glistening bunch of Gladrags, and bemoaned to an acquaintance, “ye dhandha ab bahut paisa maangta hai. Pichhle maheene 40,000 oopar se kharcha aaya tha.”
Across the Ansari road, which the book market doesn’t cross, stand decrepit 19th century houses with no signs of habitation except air conditioners fitted onto the windows. Maybe there live in these houses people who once owned bookshops in Daryaganj, and now have shut out the sight of the rude street market. Were it not for the air conditioners, it would be certain the houses were home to ghosts.
The pavement, though, is brimming with mortal life, and the road with honking machines. Finding a book now becomes an affair of the hard grind. The whole place looks a dumping ground for America’s publishing industry–weirder and weirder paperbacks stretched out for a good tropical tan. But at least a book is a book is a book: paper that can be recycled.
Two boys from Delhi University have newly entered the trade. Part time, they explain. They are selling run of the mill stuff and refuse to bargain. Ahead, a woman stands to attention, fanned furiously by an attendant. She shrills the exact price of each book from that studied distance, and those who pass close by her quicken their steps.
But really, all’s well with the Daryaganj bazaar. William Shakespeare still towers overs this stage. In countless editions and imprints, and at at least half of all the stalls, the bard is alive and singing. The Signet edition, selling at Rs 20, remains the best place to find him
though.
At the end, my picks of the week: Sarvepalli Gopal’s three volume biography of Nehru, John Kenneth Galbraith’s Economics and the Public Purpose, and Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception–two essays on the liberating effect of psychedelic drugs that inspired Jim Morrison to call his band ‘The Doors’–all of them for Rs 140.
Now that the hurlyburly’s done, there’s one small thing left. Riksha! Onwards to Karim’s.
