Ajit complained incessantly about the book industry: ignorant sales reps, who did not know the difference between Isabel Allende and Marguerite Duras. He spent most of his day scanning catalogues of international publishing houses, highlighting titles he wanted for his shop, and then pursuing his orders through a recalcitrant bureaucracy.
All this arduous curation made him impatient with visitors to the shop, mostly affluent people in expensive clothes, who wanted discounts on books with already very low or marked-down prices. He would look up, his face impassive, and then simply say, “No.” I noticed over time that his responses ranged in severity. Those asking for greeting cards or the bestseller of the day met with pure contempt. He said nothing at all to people who failed to recall the title or the name of the author and vaguely offered, “It’s about elephants…”
He would cry out, as though in pain, if he saw someone mishandling a book. I shared his outrage. As the months passed, my days came to be organized around visits to the bookshop; and I felt a bit proprietorial about its wares.
Ajit seemed happy for me to use his bookshop as a library or sorts. But I wanted actually to be his customer rather than a mere browser. (Though dedicated to advancing socialism, the Soviet-subsidized bookshops with their cheap offerings had infected me with the neuroses of private ownership.)
In the past, I had saved money on my meals to buy the few books I possessed. There were few such opportunities for self-denial at JNU. I had to wait for a windfall—a birthday present or a Diwali gift from my parents or sisters, who had started to work.
As my savings grew I found them outpaced by my desire to buy a three-volume Vintage US edition of Remembrance of Things Past, which I saw advertised in a catalogue that Ajit regularly perused. I had already read Proust in a Penguin Classics edition borrowed from an older friend in Allahabad. But this seemed, in the classic mental inflation of the besotted consumer, something superior: the Scott Moncrieff translation revised by Terence Kilmartin.
It took me a few visits to summon up the courage to ask Ajit if he would order the volumes for me. I could only pay for them in instalments, I said. Much to my delight, he agreed. I still remember the weeks of anticipation leading up to the moment when I saw the volumes in their hard case at the shop, and the pure ecstasy with which I carried them back to my room and smelled the pages.
My own indulgence in sensuous consumerism was no coincidence. The Soviet Union had already imploded, perestroika and glasnost bringing down the shutters on Soviet-subsidized bookshops in India. A shop selling greeting cards replaced a Communist bookshop I used to visit in Delhi. The Indian middle classes were moving away from decades of economic protectionism and virtuous austerity; they had started to embrace unselfconsciously the culture of consumption.
The market around Fact and Fiction registered these changes. The first sign was the Priya Cinema turning into a multiplex. A pastry shop opened, followed by a supermarket selling imported cheeses, where the youngest members of a rising affluent class could be seen savouring their growing wealth. Their glowingly clear skin tones and brand-name jeans and sneakers, their emblems of class as well as caste, gave the market a touch of glamour, and made me anxious about the future of Ajit’s venture.
In the 1990s, my search for a perfect retreat took me to a village in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, nearly a day’s journey from Delhi. In my serenely unhurried time there, I started to write more regularly, and to publish book reviews in Indian periodicals. The fees were meagre, but sufficient for me to buy a book or two a month. I always returned to Delhi with some eagerly hoarded cash and mounting excitement. I would go straight to Fact and Fiction to find Ajit hunched morosely as always over his desk, but keen to show me his latest acquisitions.
As the years passed, I was also able to afford more of his books, and have them mailed to my Himalayan home. I plucked them out of the shelves, and watched with pleasure my personal pile of books rise on the floor around Ajit’s desk. I was now, finally, a regular customer.
I also developed another bond with the bookshop. The publisher for Penguin in Delhi noticed my book reviews, and wrote to ask if I would write a book for him. Flattered, I immediately suggested a travel book on Indian small towns, which, I suspected, had become with the growth of social aspiration the crucible for India’s political and cultural transformation.
It was hard for me to leave my village, and travel to tourist-addled Shimla just ten miles away, let alone imagine myself picking my way through the squalor of small-town India. But the desire to write a book and become a published author, which had barely expressed itself during my years of random reading and scribbling, suddenly seemed close to fulfilment. For six months I travelled around India, using various modes of transport—buses, cars, trains and, once, a ferry.
During my travels I discovered that the placid small-town India of my books-filled childhood had all but disappeared—the family-planning slogans, such as Hum Do Hamare Do (“Two of Us, Two We Have”), as well as the framed pictures of Gandhi exhorting austere living; Indrajal and Amar Chitra Katha comics substituted for Superman and Batman; and Rasna powder and Rooh Afza sherbet to slake our thirst for sugary colas.
The Indian economy, liberalized in 1991, now offered, together with religious nationalism and satellite television, to bridge the gap between desire and consummation, where I had previously lived. There was less need for local substitutes, let alone books, and a culture of reflection and reading. Images invoking the world’s richness—its great material plenitude—were suddenly everywhere: in billboards promising to equip the nuclear family with multiple cars and also palatial houses with private guards.
My book, describing the darkly ambiguous progress of the New India, came out, and, much to my surprise, did well. The next time I went to Fact and Fiction it was displayed in the window. Ajit told me that a lot of people had asked for it. Over the next twenty years, I would return to the bookshop each time I published a book for the immense thrill of seeing it in the window, chosen from among many on the shelves that I had once longed to possess.
Ajit’s mood, however, was grimmer each time I saw him. He complained a lot more about the retail trade, increasingly dominated by execrably written bestsellers for young adults, and about the commercial rents in the area, which were rising steeply, squeezing his profits. A chain bookshop had opened in the vicinity, threatening to drive him out of the market. E-retailers like Amazon and Flipkart had increased the number of people looking up cheaper bargains on smartphones.
Literary festivals with internationally famous writers, which grew exponentially in India, did little to boost book sales; they were, he said, celebrity peep shows. Young readers, addicted to mass-market fiction and self-help titles produced by a handful of writers, showed no signs of growing up and moving on to more nutritious fare. India’s very few independent bookshops were rapidly going out of business.
Yet Ajit was as determined as ever to keep his shop free of non-literary offerings and greeting cards. Little did I know that he was running out of time. A couple of years ago, a friend—among the many I had introduced to Ajit—told me that the bookshop’s “days are numbered”. The expression felt callous, but it did at least prepare me for the news last year that Ajit had finally decided to close his bookshop.
I was in Delhi then, and thought of visiting Fact and Fiction, but then I saw an article by Ajit on a news website. He said he was proud when his old clients came into the shop with their children, and told them how the bookshop was “an integral part of their formative years”. “They actually thank me!” he wrote.
But then he added: “For the past several years, I have spent hours wondering what has happened to my dream profession. Where have my loyal clients gone? Where have the friendships, forged over the counter discussing the joys of reading and discovering old and new books, vanished?”
Reading this, I thought I couldn’t go back. I felt guilty about my own prolonged absences from the bookshop, and about
the fact that I had been reading a lot more on Kindle, participating in effect in the general undermining of bricks-and-mortar bookshops.
Furthermore, there had been harsh reminders in recent months that reading and writing literary fiction and non-fiction are dispensable luxuries of a tiny minority. A malign and often murderous political movement—Hindu nationalism—had started to target intellectuals and artists. Writers had been assassinated or assaulted, with banning and public bonfires of books and death threats by demagogues. They seemed horribly exposed to the rage of the left-behind, the frustrations of the overambitious, and the contempt of the rich.
Fact and Fiction closed in late 2015. Ajit called it a “mercy killing” in one of the many articles that appeared. He seemed relieved. I shared his unsentimental mood. Bookshops still give me a frisson when I pass them on the street, even though I know they do not—cannot—hold the riches that the young provincial in me found at Fact and Fiction one afternoon in 1989.
It is also true that we had both been refugees from a frantically “developing” country, whose priorities of economic growth and individual aggrandizement did not include, and possibly deliberately excluded, an intellectual and literary culture.
So many landmarks had disappeared since I first visited the bookshop that humid day in 1989, and daydreamed about owning the three volumes of Proust. India has been on a relentless march of progress since then. The destination has grown less clear, and the way ahead looks even more arduous. But this is how the “angel of history” moves, as Walter Benjamin once wrote: the storm of progress that smashes everything in its way driving him relentlessly into the future, while “the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky”.
Intimacy
DORTHE NORS
… a book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory.
—Jorge Luis Borges
“Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw”
It’s summer, I think. Through Grandma’s windows I can see the terraced houses across the street. The hedges that border the front yards have yellow blossoms; I know they’re called cinquefoils. An old coffee-stained book lies on the low table. It’s much too warm here, for Grandma doesn’t dare open windows. It’s the draught; it goes right into her side. The pain runs from a spot under her ribs, up under her shoulder blades and so to her neck. She says it makes her entire face tense. So we’re not allowed to open the windows, and I’m sitting on the couch, which is moss green and striped. On the front of the book are two girls’ names and a woman in robes standing erect. One of the names has written the book, the other’s its subject. I’m twelve, maybe thirteen, and I don’t know who’s who, and now Grandma comes back from the bedroom. She’s been to fetch the last two volumes. Since I can no longer read them, you may as well have them, she says. The books jostle her coffee cup when she sets them down, but one coffee stain more or less makes no difference. The books have been read to tatters. I was also bad about lending them out, Grandma says.
The reason I’m to have them is that reading books makes Grandma’s neck hurt; she can’t tolerate sitting with something in her hands, and she also says that all the flies have vanished from the face of the earth. Back when they lived out on the farm, when Grandpa was alive, there were flies everywhere. She says that since she moved to town, the flies have disappeared. Could well be that hole in the ozone, Grandma says, and I think it could also be that we’re not allowed to open the windows. So I’ve read them for the last time, she says with a sigh, placing her hand upon the stack. It was Bookman Erichsen, you know, who got me to buy them.
It’s as if her age is shifting inside her. She’s no longer Grandma but the woman she was before. She’s looking out of the window, and if her gaze weren’t so blurred by the dissolution of time, it’d be the cinquefoil she was looking at. He was a tall man, she says, Bookman Erichsen. It was a classy shop to step into. No clutter on the shelves. And I knew of course where to find Morten Korch. He was on the left when you entered, and he was who we read, Grandpa and I. What we would do is that Grandpa would lie down on the divan, and then I’d sit down in the chair beside it, and then I’d read from Morten Korch while we had coffee. That was in the evenings.
I’m twelve, maybe thirteen years old, and I’m familiar with Morten Korch. He wrote books about and for country people. In them everything was idyllic, and distinctions black and white, and in the fifties his books were made into movies. Danes crowded into the darkness of movie theatres to see Korch’s romantic portraits of farm life. During most of my childhood, the TV showed a Korch film every Saturday night to entertain a little nation, a people that was starting to lose its roothold. But before these nights on TV Korch’s books had been regular fare in their small homes, and Grandma had sat under a kerosene lamp and read page after page about how good it was to be a farmer, while Grandpa had lain arthritic on the divan and listened. Of course I was always able to find the Korch shelf at Erichsen’s on my own, says Grandma. But then one day Erichsen was suddenly standing there in person. White shirt, black jacket, and he must have been married, for his trousers were creased. You could really tell he was someone who wanted to do something for his customers. It was almost embarrassing, says Grandma, though she doesn’t mean it. She’s smiling in any case, and it’s summer, and something is blooming in her mind’s eye. Then I said to Erichsen I was just going to see if there was anything new from Korch, and Erichsen said, “There’s always something new from Korch, even though Korch has nothing new to say,” and then he cocked his head a bit to the side and said I ought to stop reading such crap. Very shiny shoes he had, and elegant, and then he bent over me and said, “May I, ma’am?” And I had no clue what it was he was asking, so I blushed.
Grandma holds a hand up before her eyes. Now she’s alone for a moment with herself and Erichsen, and then I can tell she’s back: He said I should challenge my excellent brain. He said he had books that would do something to me, and then he found Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset. He had the whole trilogy, but I’d been sent into town by Grandpa to buy Korch. We dug the potatoes up in the autumn, you know. The rows were terribly long, and when your father was a boy, he cried when we set him at the end of a row and told him he’d have to keep digging till he reached the far end. You should have seen our hands when we’d come in at night. We couldn’t grip anything, and our nails would be all torn up, and then Grandpa would want to be read to. It bored the children, for then they weren’t allowed to speak in front of him. The radio had to be turned off too, and then he’d lie there and stare at the damp stain on the ceiling while I read about the big open barns and the wagons loaded high. But then it was Erichsen thought I should buy Kristin Lavransdatter instead. “It’s the sort of a book you won’t soon forget, ma’am.” I didn’t manage to tell him that my husband would probably disagree, because Erichsen was too busy leafing through pages and explaining. He touched me lightly on the elbow and talked about Sigrid Undset. About Norway. And feminine forces, good Lord.
Grandma’s got stumpy old legs. She wears nylon stockings, and her dress is always polyester. When you touch her, she rustles synthetically; the lenses of her glasses are smudged. She’s over eighty, and Grandpa and Erichsen are both long dead. But then I bought them, Grandma says, fumbling with the first volume till she’s lifted it free of the coffee table. And that’s something I could never explain to anyone: what it was like to ride the bus home with no Morten Korch.
Something is happening behind Grandma’s small locked face. There’s a sorrow in there, yet beside it pride as well over something I’m too young to understand, and yet I understand that it’s Erichsen who’s put it there. We become the person someone imagines we are, and now the books are mine; or we become what we read, and Erichsen’s Bookshop was borne along by a belief that we can grow away from the place we’ve always been forced to stand. We hav
e the potential to become greater than the role we’ve been expected to play. To set this growth in motion requires affection and respect for the human being as a phenomenon—and the growth can be triggered by a bookseller’s interested and learned presence. I know this because I visited the bookshop myself for many years afterward. Overseen by the man who succeeded Erichsen, and the man who succeeded him, but as we sat there in Grandma’s flat I was twelve, maybe thirteen. It was summer, I think; the cinquefoil was blooming. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with the old books. They were yellowed and smelled of bedrooms and dust. Fingers had dog-eared the pages and frayed the edges. The spines had long since cracked and separated. How am I supposed to take care of them? I thought. And what is it I’m supposed to take care of? Three books? Or something in Grandma? I didn’t know, though I had a suspicion, and then I turn fourteen, turn fifteen, turn sixteen and still I don’t touch Kristin Lavransdatter. I can’t read books that have been read so mercilessly, and I haul Sigrid and Kristin through one flat after another. I study literature at the university, I write, I publish my first novel, and one day in 2003 Grandma dies, nearly one hundred years old. I’ve lied to her for decades. I’ve said, Oh yes, I’ve read Kristin Lavransdatter, every time she asked. But I haven’t read Kristin Lavransdatter. I managed to get a master’s in Nordic literature and wander through one literary situation after another without having read Kristin Lavransdatter. Yet I still have the books. They’re in a box in a storage room, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with them, now Grandma’s no longer alive. I can’t throw them away.
Browse Page 12
