Back of Books

                                             

This article will be talking about the world of books and the actors who populate this world, before the book reaches the hands its reader.
 

Mandi House metro station is located at a very favourable place for the art lovers of New Delhi. Inside the metro station, hoardings can tell you about various art events at Indian Habitat Centre, National School of Drama, etc. Outside the metro station, with all the larger banners and billboards, you can get to know about various theatre and dance shows. Sahitya Akademi Library, Delhi Public Library, Oxford Bookstore are at walking distance from this station. At regular hours, you can find people paying 5rs for chai, sipping conversation in between and eating crack jack biscuits. There are also make shift shops where you can buy chips, namkeen, sweet potato, chaat, handkerchiefs, socks, earphones, mobile covers, etc. The Jamun trees that line the Copernicus road provide enough shade during the worst summer days and also act as umbrella when the unpredictable weather of Delhi chooses to confirm its arbitrariness by raining in November. The roads are however unsurprising because of the traffic jams during morning and evening hours as it connects to the busy stretch of Connaught Place, India Gate and ITO. The pavements are regularly chalked with coloured drawings – sometimes kids, sometimes women, sometimes men, sometimes a young boy, sometimes a middle age man, can be seen drawing on these tiled pavements with deep interest.

It was one such evening. Three young men, sat with an old battered black radio, formed a circle and were sketching with coloured chalks on the pavement that leads to Mandi House Metro Station. The sound of Kishore Kumar was impressing a smile on almost all metro goers and many were looking at the coloured covers of books spread on the tiled sidewalk but no one really made a stop there. Another constant at this station’s route is a bookseller, who sits near the exit of metro station. He sells bestsellers. The bestsellers are set and spread in a way so that you see all the books. I was interested in this art of setting up books – a way to garner attention – it was like books were themselves getting up a little bit and calling out to you to have a look at them. ‘Pick me, Choose me’. 

In the front row sits Chetan Bhagat’s new book. In the last row lies Ministry of Utmost Happiness. All the books are covered with cellophane packaging except for Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

My curiousness and the sound of Kishore Kumar gave me a push to ask him about books. I have always wondered about the relationship of books with sellers. A few months back, I was at ITO’s traffic light when I saw a man on the footpath counting books in sets and not as a singular item. He did not put the books in a bag. With one hand he took a bunch of books and placed it in the bag. He packed the books in sets, carried those 20-30 book titles in a battered white plastic bag on his back and continued walking to wherever he was going.

Near Mandi House

The bookseller at the metro station is a man who sits behind a desk covered with white plastic. The desk is two feet higher than the ground. The plastic seems old and looks like it has been reused several times. On it he sells mobile accessories. Adjacent to the desk, on the ground is the collection, spread again on old white plastic, that invited attention but not sales. He says he sits only in evenings. “From 4 to 9.”

This is also the time when Mandi House is most active and bustling. It is the time when office goers go back home and students like me return to their homes.  I ask him “Do all the books get sold?” He looks at me, pauses, studies me and then says “No. But look at this...” He points at the wide expanse of his plastic sheet and the books kept on it. He stretches his arms. Surely, the white plastic sheet on the ground takes more space than the mobile desk which has covers for mobile phones too. “But how do you get to know which books are being sold, or what people are buying, because I can see that all the books that you have are best sellers?” I ask. “We know. We keep a list. We keep getting updated. Just look at this…” He prods me to look at the collection. He proudly shows them to me. “Look at this one, Room 105, Chetan Bhagat’s new one.”

He corrects the arrangement and puts the bestseller Chetan Bhagat in the first row for other heads on walking legs to see. I wonder how comical might people look from a place where he is sitting and selling books. I saw mostly legs hurrying. In between our conversation, his eyes are alert to plausible customers and he keeps looking at other people, who for a moment slow down to see the books but no one really stops. He keeps books in a slant position, such that each book is being supported by the other book’s back. All the book titles are also visible to passers-by. It is only the books in the last row that are lying flat and are hidden by the shade of the tiled platform above it.

Along with the books he also sells tempered glass for mobile phones, back covers, etc. He sits on the broad tiled pavemented railing that runs along the footpath. Behind him are plants that have sharp leaves. I ask him how many books are sold in a day. His answers are monosyllabic and evasive. I understand that I am being intrusive without telling him my reason for doing so. He shakes his head and fidgets with the rubber band in his hand. I ask him where he gets the books from. He says “I get it myself.” “But, where do you get these books from?” He looks hesitant. He asks why I am asking all this, finally.

It is my time to get nervous as I am not really sure if he will answer me or dismiss me. I tell him that I am writing about books and their life before books are made. “Matlab, you are looking at Writing. Because before the books come, it is the writing that happens. People write books. Then you read these.” I laugh at myself. I correct myself. “No. I mean that I am looking at the time in life of books before they reach someone – like how you get it, how you store it, where you store it…” He cuts me, for good in between and seemed a little excited “Oh, I got it.” He points to his collection of books and says “I get these from Daryaganj. I carry these myself in this bag.” He shows me threadbare canvas bags with big bold letters of ‘Eagle brand masala’ written on one of the bags. The letters have eroded over a long period of use. The bags are not large enough and I wonder how he tries to put all these books in one bag. Another set of bags has been kept under his seat. He gets up and tilts the seat cover for me to see. “A lot of care needs to be taken. See”, he arranges the tempered glass’s boxes on the desk and shows me how he succeeds in packing books and putting them together. He places one layer of books vertically and then above it, another layer of books horizontally. He uses his hands and forms a ‘T’ to explain to me. He describes how he takes care of the books. “This way, books do not fold and their covers do not fold. I clean them myself. Need to be wiped after regular intervals as this is a busy road and dust settles on them quite frequently. I dust them (books). The plastic covering prevents the books from getting dirty. I covered these myself. We don’t get these covered from the market. You can see for yourself that these are clean right now.” I nodded in agreement.

“Where do you go in Daryaganj to buy?” I ask. “Aree, you won’t find all of these at Daryaganj. These are special. Some of them...” “Yes, they are. Look, at that cover of Harry Potter book. Blue one. I have not seen cover like these in any of the bookshops in Daryaganj.” “Exactly! We get these from various places.” “Like?” “Daryaganj only, but many places.” “So, what do you do with these after you are done for the day?” “I take them back.” “To Daryaganj?” He shakes his head with energy and says “Akshardham.” “How do you carry them? Rickshaws?” He shakes his head resolutely and says “No. By BUS. Rickshaws will take 100 Rs, for just taking this much load” and laughs when he says this.  “So, what do you do for example if the books do not get sold?” “We exchange with people who want them. There are people who ask us or call us that we need so and so book. We go and give it to them.”

“But then what is your primary business?” I ask.  He opens his arms a bit more this time and directed his eyes at the desk and grazed both his hands in air, as if throwing some playing cards around, as if there is a visible treasure that I am not seeing, “this” pointing at the white plastic clad desk. “I sold only 10 books last week. With this (mobile accessories) I make around 1000-800 Rs. per day.” He is sad to admit it and his shoulders drooped as he gets bitter when he looks at the books. It is then I ask him whether he accepts people bargaining. He said yes but looked defeated. Like someone admitting that he didn’t have much choice in matters like these. He says that he changes price accordingly. But it doesn’t look like he likes doing this.

While we were having this conversation, a young man in a hurry, stops and asks the price of a book. He points at the book. The book seller blurts out the name of the book with utmost ease and says “200”. The young man leaves without saying anything or looking back at the book or the book seller again.

I ask him about the competition from other book sellers at Mandi House or Rajiv Chowk as he usually works in Darya Ganj or Mandi House. “There is no point going to Rajiv Chowk. There are already a lot of people (booksellers) there. If I am only selling 3-4 books in this area, entry of one more person in the market will defeat both our sales. So, no one enters. Why would they?”

The seller was seeing books as goods. As a consumer of books, I see books both as goods and as a service. Goods are the items you buy; service is an action that a person does for someone else, for example, teaching. In communicating with booksellers and libraries I was seeing the act of dealing with books both as a good and as a service. A bookseller in the process of giving me a book is also initiating my reading experience.

If you go to bookshops in Daryaganj, you will realise how busy the sellers are. That at every point of time people employed in bookshops are involved in more than one activity. That these sites are not just about books. That these sites are not only the pleasure of books or about the beauty of books or about how time seems to stop in libraries. That these sites are about labour. That the sights we see are infected with exertion. That these sites are about effort involved in making books reach a reader. Maybe we realise it at the billing counter, or when the package gets delivered, or may be much before all of that, when we have to make sure our books don’t turn yellow.

It is at the billing counter where you see what is being sold and what is being bought. The books that are being sold are not the only things that are being bought here. There are pencils, pens, fevicols, stapler pins carefully placed near the exit of the shop or near the bill counter. There are pencil boxes, water colours, coloured A4 size papers, being bought. The famous Book Bazaar in Daryaganj, is a large bookshop which sells books according to weight- ‘100 Rs for a kilo, 200 Rs for a kilo’- these cards can be seen hanging outside as well as inside the shop. Books are not just stocked on shelves here, there are cartons that are filled with books. In such cartons, rarely are people correcting the arrangement of books, they are just searching for the right book. What is more important to sellers is that a 100 Rs. book does not mix with 200 Rs. book. There is a separate carton for picture books, for CDs, for pencil box, for colours, pencil colours, crayons.

At Daryaganj: The early hours when the space is being set up for books and readers. Music by Indian playback singer Mukesh in the background.

These card boxes demand effort. To search for a book demands effort. And then getting disappointed when you like none of the contents in the box, demands an equal struggle to move to the next box.  

The thrill about buying books is also in gaining entry in the immediate surrounding where these books are kept; it is about remembering not just the story inside the books but also the story around books; about recollecting right next to which books did I find Why I am a Hindu, or how Diary of a Wimpy Kid is at the back of the bookshop where they keep Arihant’s 16 years Solved Papers for AIIMS.  

The delight is not just in finding a book. It is the labour around books that fulfils such moments of delight and these laborious moments that are mostly hidden away maybe in our bills, or the time you take in the queue, or how you would like the shelf could have been better cleaned. What makes a book worth is also the moments of its immediate surroundings. Someone has kept books there in the shelf, this is called cataloguing. A reader kept a book on the wrong shelf, this is called mistake. You complained about the dusty bookshelves, next time maybe you will find the shelf a little less dusty, this is called taking care. You may also find hard bound copies of that classic, or the rolled and yellowed pages in that book of poems and hence choose to buy something else.

Scene from Sahitya Akademi Library

What interests me about the hidden labour is the act of sacrifice. This hidden labour is as much as a thing in motion as the book is. This kind of attention to the process of following the life around books or things-in-motion, returns our attention to the things themselves. When people say ‘it feels like time is stuck in libraries’, to understand this feeling we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. In libraries, the jacketed books, the yellowed books, the folded books, the dust that appears to never have loosen its track and always settling on shelves, in between spaces between two books, all contribute to make that feeling even more apparent. The physical thing called dust collects and contributes to timelessness.

A person who helped me out at the bookshop in Daryaganj, sits at the back, is not employed by the bookshop. He says that he likes coming there and helps with the sales. He has some idea of where books of which kind are kept. He confidently points, while sitting in his chair, to corners where cook books are, where coffee table books are, where JEE Main prep books are, where Yoga books are.

At Daryaganj, recently more of such ‘sell by weights’ bookshops have come. At one of the bookshops the seller tells me “We were earlier at Nai Sadak. We have been there for more than 10 -15 years. We came here 5 years back. All the other bookshops that you see around yourself have just come up. We are the oldest here.”

The life of books is not just about the reader or till the time the book is being read or till the time someone in Daryaganj keeps seeing themselves as the oldest haven of books. The life of books is also about till the time the book remains in that carton. 

Computer Science text books being used to support things. 

Circulation is not the word that I am looking for. There are books in houses that are used as paperweights, as a way to level something up, as a way to support the frail picture frame. Class 12 computer science books are kept underneath mixer grinder so that it does not fall off. Reading is not the only function of books. However, it is true that I have once read all those books. But what happens after reading that object. It is equally important to see what happens to a book after you read it. As much as there is ‘before’ side of the book, there is also ‘after’ side of the book.

One of the doors at the community library in Sinkanderpur has this poster stuck.

Even in the 'before' part, some books will always remain at bottom in the carton, unattended, sometimes attended. The labour behind books needs to be observed and valued as much as the book.  Even if the canvas bag is torn and weary, it is still being carried on someone’s back. That back may be aching or might be on medication.

Scene from a Community Library in Sikanderpur