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A market mauled
When The Bookshop in Khan Market brought down its shutters for the last time two months back I was upset, writes Bhaichand Patel.
When The Bookshop in Khan Market brought down its shutters for the last time two months back I was upset. Next to where I live, I visit it most Saturdays. One could find just about any book as long as you weren’t an academic. If they didn't have it in stock and it was still in print they would get it for you within a day or two.
Best of all, the people who ran the place loved and knew books. You could browse and chat with the owner, KD Singh. You were likely to bump into friends looking for a good read. The place reminded you of bookshops of old days in London and New York before W.H. Smith and Barnes and Noble ran them out of town.
The Bookshop has gone, driven out by the current rents in Khan Market. It has been replaced by a shop that sells hideous, very expensive crystal, the stuff you get at weddings and you hide it till you get the opportunity to pass it on to someone else.
My sense of loss was somewhat tempered by the fact that The Bookshop still exists in Jor Bagh, not too far from the old place. If the loss of The Bookshop upset me, I was truly depressed when soon after, Rajaram and Sons ‘The Khemists’, a few doors away also lost its lease. The chemist shop had been there from as far back as anyone can remember. It was an old-fashioned shop, the kind you still find in some hill stations. It never modernised. There was an ancient glass counter below which you could see the cough drops, the soaps and toothpastes.
Rajaram was not only my chemist. The proprietor was my doctor for ailments too small to visit a doctor — an irritation in the eye, a sore throat or flu. Boy, he was as good.
Until five years ago, Khan Market had remained more or less the same since it was built soon after Partition to provide livelihood for refugee merchants. Is Khan Market turning into a mall? It looks that way. Shops which once housed cobblers, grocers and sellers of plastic buckets are now coffee shops that charge an arm and a leg for a cup and pasta joints that offer the Punjabi version of spaghetti. If you are looking for Nike sneakers or designer clothes, Khan Market’s the place.
The brats who hang out there these days don’t read books, they watch MTV. They are young and don’t have aches and pains that require the services of chemists. And when they do need drugs, the dealer is only a phone call away.
