Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for instance, always smells like pink guava to me. On Netaji Subhash Marg, between Sablok Clinic and the now-defunct Golcha Cinema, there are booksellers offering Indian and international books at wholesale rates.
At ₹50 a kg, the books are woebegone, well-handled and distressed. However, you’re guaranteed to find a gem or two in this lot if you’re patient, such as a Hind Pocket Book edition of Encounter in Umbugland by Vijay Tendulkar.
Next is the ₹100 a kg slot. You can get 3-4 new Lee Childs, Nora Roberts, Jo Nesbos and Stephen Kings. And if lucky, Iain Banks’ cult classic, Raw Spirit, his celebration of choice single malt whiskies and motoring.
The next slot is the ₹200 a kg section where you find hardbacks, literary novels, poetry collections, books on politics and history, and biographies. The ₹500 stack consists mostly of bulky coffee table tomes.
You look at the vast sea of books in these warehouse bookstores and are confronted with a sense of mortality as an author. Here, there are so many of us that one realises making a mark and being remembered as a writer of distinction will be a daunting task for most. However, if you’re only a reader with no literary pretensions whatsoever, then that walk between Sablok Clinic and Golcha is sublime. The high you feel is akin to that of a dipsomaniac from Mumbai visiting Gurugram’s L-1 liquor warehouses. Should I buy Ardbeg or Laphroaig or Lagavulin?In Daryaganj, you will find books that you have given up hopes of ever attaining. Like a complete set of Herge’s Quick & Flupke albums, long out of print in India. Or a signed first edition of Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold. Over the past 30 years, I have met many novelists, but Nagarkar is the only great one whose hand I have shook. Cuckold, along with VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Mohan Rakesh’s Andhere Band Kamre are novels which when I first read them, left me in a fever dream for days on end.Reading a truly great novel is perhaps like walking through a minefield in Dandakaranya. There are explosions, small and large, all around in your mind, and you can see the many prejudices and platitudes fall by the wayside as you turn page after page.
By the end of the novel, you have crossed the minefield and are standing on the other side, transformed. You are no longer the person who first started reading. The novel has changed you, remastered your chemical equilibrium. It is the reason so many novels are burned all over the world in protest. At its core, all great novels are incendiary. They burn away all your impurities.
Even for many novelists, the truly great novels are one-offs. Naipaul never wrote another Biswas, Nagarkar not another Cuckold. The creation of those masterpieces changed them too. And while writing them they had walked through minefields of their own.
For authors, these warehouse bookstores can be daunting places where they are in some manner reduced to being vegetables, weighed and bundled in plastic bags. Yet, another way to look at it is that here they are a source of sustenance once more. They assuage a hunger that conventional bookstores with their high overheads and retail prices can’t ever.
I have seen the best minds remaindered in Daryaganj. Here, you find stacks of Roy, Ghosh, Rushdie and Rooney, all feeding the frenzy of sweat-soaked readers. It is when you are remaindered that you finally meet your true readers. As I greedily stuff three copies of Geoff Dyer’s Working the Room-the Canongate edition-into my bag, I long to find myself remaindered among the greats one day, too.
