By
Nurat Maqbool Bawan
Tucked away amid the bustling energy of one of Srinagar’s busiest markets, Residency Road, stood a quaint shop called Kashmir Book Shop.
A bookshop that drew people into a zone of extreme serenity, where books were allowed to speak for themselves.
Once you stepped inside, you entered another dimension. It was dimly lit, neither flashy nor loud – a warm bookshop, where silence welcomed you. Your thoughts no longer ran astray. It was a zen moment: an awareness of the present, a feeling akin to leaving your shoes outside a temple or a mosque, shedding something you had been dragging along.
Every day after college, my friend and I would visit the KBS and stroll through the various sections. The footfall there was decent – neither too crowded nor empty.
Even on days when we bought nothing, we lingered contentedly- simply to spend time with and among the books.
One of the professors at our college – unmarried at that time once said, “If I ever have children, and there’s one place I would surely take them, it would be this – Kashmir Book Shop.’
I do not know if she ever did, as the shop closed some time after the death of its manager, Mr. Abdul Rashid – a deeply humble man.
Someone who knew his books like the back of his hand.
You could walk in and ask for a particular book, and not only would he have good knowledge about it but also understand it. “Its good but may I suggest another?” Then he would tell the difference in their approaches, guiding you gently, never selling.
He would ask students or youngsters why they preferred certain books over others. And through these conversations, he came to understand what truly worked.
My cousins had the best collection of fairy tales during our childhood. Apart from the familiar stories—Snow White, The Ugly Duckling, Goldilocks and the Three Bears—they also had lesser-known tales, like Snow White and Red Rose. The most enchanting of all was a pop-up Thumbelina book. The moment you opened its first page, you were transported into another world. All these books came on the recommendation of Mr. Rashid, who was also a friend of my uncle.
As we grew a little older, they had an encyclopaedia that contained the most bizarre and fascinating facts from around the globe. In that pre-internet era, it was our window to the strange, and awe-inspiring happenings of the world.
This is missing among booksellers today.
Ask for a book now, and the bookseller often stares at you blankly. There is little sense of the books, writers, or contemporary literary fiction.
Then, there were other bookshops where books from Random House or Penguin were available, but only in hazy print. At times, they stocked translated books of Rumi, downloaded straight from the internet and bound into paperbacks.
Once, I bought a book on grammar and was flabbergasted to see phrases such as ‘click here to know more’. It turned out to be a printed version of an online grammar course from a prestigious foreign university.
At a time when bookstores in Kashmir openly sold pirated books, Kashmir Book Shop held onto its integrity and dignity. They sold only original books.
With the closing of the shop, a whole generation of readers seemed to vanish with it. Today, bookshops in Kashmir mostly house pulp fiction; literary fiction has taken a back seat.
Even after two decades of Kashmir Book Shop’s closure, there is hardly any place in Srinagar where book lovers can visit and stroll through the stacks of books, just for the love of it.
Now, whenever I walk along the pavement of Residency Road, my heart longs to see that bookshop again – a place where words leapt off a page and stayed with you for life; where quiet memories were made to last a lifetime.
Nurat Maqbool is a Kashmir-based writer. Her work has appeared in Adda, Juggernaut, Sultan’s Seal, and elsewhere.
