A city is not just buildings and people. A city is the words that it speaks and reads. For any city worth its name, it is an extremely sad day when a book shop has to down its shutters and walk into the sunset while shaking off the dust of the collected books off its hands.
The day a bookshop closes is the day a city's soul dies. There are no tears, no mournful songs are sung, the funeral is held with the flick of a switch that plunges the entire shop into darkness.
The darkness, I presume, hides the pain of each letter printed in a book. The darkness hides the fact that the city betrayed those words and left them to die.
In Gurgaon, I have seen more book shops shutting down than I would be comfortable with. The first one was Crossword at 32nd milestone which shut down and went out without so much as a whisper.
Then came Books and Beyond. A favourite haunt for me, my wife and my son, Anhad, who had become good friends with the manager. Quill and Canvas, in Galleria, shut down soon after that. Thankfully, it was just relocating.
The latest, a place where I have spent hours with my family browsing through books and music and toys, is Landmark. Yesterday, when I walked into the store, there was a smell of desperation, a smell of despondency in the store which lay almost half empty.
My initial reaction was that they must have organised something here that's why most of the stuff had been moved around. But then, screaming loudly in their silence were the empty racks, an employee sitting on the floor stacking playstation games into a carton, a woman sitting on a console table that once housed the PS3 where my son used to play games, empty racks moved into a corner ready to be moved out of the shop and bare wall clips from which once hung an array of headphones and other assorted gadgets.
I love the smell of books. Anhad loves flipping through old books and even before he starts reading a book, he raises it to his nose and inhales long and deep. I once asked him why he did that. He told me, "It is perhaps the sweetest, most comforting smell in the world after the smell of rain".
I asked an employee and he said that the store was shutting down. I asked him when. He just said, "Soon. Maybe March".
I grew up surrounded by books. I can't sleep if I don't read a book. I buy books as if I am afraid that if I don't buy them I will never get them. I have a morbid fear of running out of books to read. I hoard books and I am proud of it.
Never in my life have I ever felt more sadness than yesterday.
Death is never a happy sight, no matter how heroic, brave or tragic or unfortunate it is. Death is death. Death is the final release of a soul from this mortal life for us living beings. But how do books die? How does the written word die?
Somewhere, a promising new author is sitting and writing his first words on a computer. Will he be able to finish his book before the bookshops all die? Will digital have the same charm and appeal as the paper? I don't know. But what I do know is that for a city to give up reading, is for a city to stop breathing.
I have a dream. One day, when I am old and retired and have nothing to do, I will open a bookshop. I'll probably call it, "The most comfortable place on earth" or maybe, "The last bookstore ever" and I, surrounded by all the books of the world, shall sit in that shop, which according to my dream, is on a solitary beach or maybe a floating bookshop which floats around on the waters of the world for all eternity.
Then, maybe, just maybe, I won't have the morbid fear of words dying or of running out of books to read.
