Most peoples' lives are defined by one, or at best, two things, not unlike those small open-model desktop book-holders with vertical stands on either side.

Mine, like the closed models, had three — one D and two Bs, namely, Delhi, books and babucracy.

Delhi is where I have lived since the late 1950s. And if there is one thing that seeps through the earth and walls of Delhi, it is the dark stains of bureaucracy.

When we came to live in the Capital, my father, in a fit of nationalism, ordained that my sisters, brother and I would go only to an ‘indi' medium school. Result: I could not and would not read English until I was 12, not properly anyway.

My mother would plead with me, my brother would laugh at me and my sisters would leave English books on my bed. All to no avail.

Then one day I discovered Enid Blyton's Secret Seven , and since then I have read only two Hindi books, Raag Darbari and Mukhya Mantri both by the late Manohar Shyam Joshi. I missed, says a friend, the Hindi pulp fiction of Gulshan Nanda and Surendra Pathak, available mainly at railway stations. It seems the latter was an Indian James Hadley Chase.

But this literary omission was not snobbishness or anything like that. It was, and is, simply because Delhi does not have Hindi bookshops, at least in the same accessible way as it does English ones.

Vanishing species

Not that there were (or are) many of those, either. Until the end of the 1970s the best known of them — indeed the only decent bookshop that did not sell only or mainly textbooks — was Galgotias in Connaught Place.

Bahrisons and Faqir Chand were there, of course, in Khan Market.

Faqir Chand was run by an old man who we were all rather afraid of, and Bahri was altogether too miscellaneous. It is a lot better now but very cramped. You go there not to shop but buy.

Galgotias, thus, was the champion because it met the ultimate test: it was where you told girls you would meet them, in the mistaken belief that a slightly highbrow branding of yourself would perhaps lead you to highly lowbrow things.

Alas, the girls bought the books, had tea or lunch or dinner and got dropped off — in a taxi — all at your own expense. Return on investment, zero.

Many a would-be Romeo has bitten the dust after a much anticipated assignation at Galgotias, poorer in the pocket of course, but trust in human nature shattered forever.

In the 1980s and 1990s, general bookshops of this kind virtually disappeared from Delhi, as did the few second-hand ones there were. Even the Sunday pavement shops of Daryaganj went into decline. The only new bookshop selling English stuff was Teksons. In the 1990s, the small lending libraries also began to vanish. Now there are hardly any left.

Clearly, there isn't much money to be made from the enterprise.

Slow revival

It is only recently when Crossword and Landmark appeared that the book scene has revived. But they all sell books of the same genre. The old shops had fewer books but the variety was much greater.

One other addition to the book scene, at least for the genuine readers, was the slow growth of Prabhu Book Store, which sold old books for a song, at least in those days. But it was located in faraway Gurgaon and only very few knew about it.

I managed to survive the slow onset of the books drought in the 1970s. After the UPSC found me intellectually wanting, Macmillan employed me as the economics editor. Access to books of all sorts opened up like Aladdin's Cave.

Macmillan was also the distributor for Pan Books in those days which, in turn, used to distribute Mills and Boons in India. These books came, like beer, in four-packs every quarter.

I became an ardent fan and later a very competent analyst. Indeed, such was my expertise that in 1987 I wrote a 1,200 word treatise on them for the Indian Express Sunday edition.

One of the high points in my life was shaking hands with Nick Boon on the staircase, much to the irritation of the women in the office, especially Mavis and Blossom who guarded access to Mills and Boons books like Scylla and Charybdis.

Bookshop keepers

It is not only bookshops that have changed. Their keepers also have. Gone are the days when you could have a chat about a book with the owner. Looking back, it is odd how those bookshop owners were mostly refugees who did not read much but had an intimate knowledge of their stock in trade. Now computers and boys and girls in uniforms have taken their place.

The shops are much roomier, though. They think the sameness of the fare on offer can be made up by more circulating space, sofas, coffee and music.

For some people, perhaps, yes. But I miss those old bookshops where you could always discover the book on balloons you had been hankering after for years, nestling between books on China and the USSR.

Only those who have done it can know the joy of making off with such a prize, knowing that some poor sod had hidden it till he came back with money.

Hah!

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