The Janpath secret
A little-known landmark in the flea market
Jeans, kurtis, skirts, tops, handkerchiefs, ear danglers, jackets, scarves, caps, shoes, sandals... you can get all these things from Janpath flea market. Every Delhi shopper knows it. Momos, cold coffee, sandwiches, dal chaat… you can get these here as well. Every Delhi shopper knows this too. And books? They are sold in Janpath too. Many people do know about quiet old New Book Land, which stands at one end of the market. Another longtime bookstore is is the almost-famous Famous Book Store.
But there is a used bookstore nestled within the market shops, that has never been featured in newspapers (until today!), it has never been celebrated on Instagram. Strange because the British Bookstore has been here for 35 years. This evening the store is crammed with all sorts of old-fashioned racy paperbacks (Robert Ludlum, Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steele, Robin Cook) plus the classics (Pride and Prejudice, Jude the Obscure), plus the usual traffic light stuff (Steve Jobs biography, The Secret, etc), plus the literary stuff difficult to spot elsewhere, such as: Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland, John Cheever’s New Yorker Short Stories (first edition paperback), Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, Wallace Stevens’s
Collected Poems, and even a slim volume on Voltaire.
The elderly Subhash Kashyap is sitting in the only chair in the bookstore. He talks of his youthful days as a newspaper vendor, cycling every morning to deliver the dailies in Connaught Place and Paharganj. His father, a partition migrant from what is now Pakistan, also sold newspapers. “A lifetime spent selling books,” he says, shaking his head, a reluctant smile playing on his lips. Until some years back, the store was also manned by his friend Ahmad Bhai “who passed away from COVID’S second wave.”
Now three boys enter. One picks up a novel. The bookseller offers it at an obscenely cheap price, plus seduces them with his policy of buying back the book at half the price—“no time limit on returning.” The boys exit without a purchase.
But even those among us who are not into book buying must visit this store to savour this unique corner. The narrow way to the shop is walled in by great many shirts and kurtas hanging on both side; they belong to the adjacent stores. Deep within, lie the paperbacks, piled up haphazardly. In the background soars the multi-storey Jeevan Bharti building, spotted from as many corners of Connaught Place as Jama Masjid is from Old Delhi’s many by-lanes. The coupling of a barely visible landmark with the too visible landmark makes for an unique marriage.