Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
How open libraries of Flora Fountain make learning fun
Every morning, for five years, I walked a gantlet of books that demanded my attention on the streets leading from Churchgate Station to Flora Fountain. Most of my library was second-hand, books out of libraries, books that had fallen off the back of a truck, books that had a little history on them. I was not sentimental about this; I would have liked new books but I simply couldn’t afford them.
I still walk miles for books. One of my favourite slow strolls is around the Flora Fountain. There is Kitabkhana of course and Wayword & Wise seems to have undergone a resuscitation but they have limitations on what they can stock.
On this trip, I had two very specific requests. A friend’s mother said she would like to revisit Yorkshire with James Herriot and Narayan said he wanted to read Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’.
Narayan is our local character; Mahim shares him with Shivaji Park. He is a homeless man of a certain age; his address is the traffic island at the intersection of Lady Jamshedji Road with Pandurang Naik Marg, better known as Raja Rani Travels. I spotted him long before the lockdown; he was always at his ease, a gentle-eyed brown dog at his feet and a potboiler in his hands. I began supplying him with books and last week, he accepted a Tess Gerritsen with grave grace and asked for Dan Brown.
Hence, the South Mumbai visit, and then a tramp to the other bookshops. In truth, we have lost many small pockets of bibliojoie. Strand is gone but the Konkani accents ring in Kitabkhana; Smoker’s Corner is a shadow of its former self and New & Second-hand is also gone. Each one took a piece of my history with it and with it a piece of the intellectual history of the city.
On this visit, I found the books I wanted and then I rooted about for poetry. There were some over-priced Auden original hardbacks. Again, I am not that kind of collector. I want the poems, I don’t want the edition.
But the bibliophile would do well to walk the streets and see what might be thrown up. After all, Father Heras of the Heras Institute is said to have found a copy of one of the first books published on the subcontinent at a second-hand stall. (There are variations to the story: one says it was a cart on which he found it. I prefer the stall version because I don’t understand how anyone could have spotted a book on a cart unless it was a handcart.)
I discovered this at the age of fourteen or thereabouts when I peeked into a Circulating Library off the Raja Badhe Chowk at Dadar. The usual suspects had been rounded up but in a corner, there was a seventeen volume set of ‘The Arabian Nights’ as translated by Sir Richard Burton. I asked the owner of the library how much he wanted for the set and he said that he would part with it for seven hundred rupees. This was a huge amount of money forty years ago but I offered him an installment scheme. I finally bought it many months later and smuggled it home. My father had a rule: he did not believe children should be allowed to buy books. ‘You will outgrow anything you buy now,’ he said. Perhaps he was right or perhaps he knew that this would make me and my sister into avid book smugglers.
I believe that my walking habit brought me any number of glorious finds at the raddhiwaalaas of the city. In some way, this tribe is also part of the educational processes of the city. Sometimes I hear people saying about their parents’ libraries, ‘I don’t want their books to go to the raddhiwaalaa.’ And I think: Why not? There someone will buy them again and read them again and love them again. The last time I went to the Flora Fountain open-air book market, Mukhtar Baig had a series of beautiful books for me. They were poetry books from the library of someone I had known for years; Minoo Chhoi, a smallmade man in a kurta-pyjama and an embroidered waistcoat. He carried a camera wherever he went and made photographs all the time. I wonder whether his photographs have ended up in an archive.
It eases my soul to be among books. Mahim does not have any bookshops but when I need to snuffle among the books, I walk across the Matunga Road Bridge, the Z-Bridge and come down into Matunga. Although the collections there seem to have been hoovered, there is still something comforting about seeing a young woman come and hand over a book, pay some money and take another. These are our public libraries since the institutional libraries have hedged themselves around with many requirements when all that should be needed is a desire to read.