Asif Farrukhi fondly recalls some of the bookstores in Karachi that closed shop

“Ï will mark the atlas of your body with kisses …” These were some beautiful lines from Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Songs which got stuck in my head and I would keep repeating them deep down in my heart, whatever else I happened to be doing.

Someday I would like to do the same as I take a walk down memory lane holding a map of Karachi in my hand. In the name of the books I found there, I would like to mark the places where the many bookstores stood in the city I was growing up in — mark them with bowing my head — in deep gratitude but with profound sadness. These places are sites of emptiness now, shells of their former glory. I cherish the memory of those bookstores and the wonderful books that one could come across on their shelves.

An indelible impression I still carry is that of the shelves upon shelves of old books, the topmost of which could only be reached by ladders which looked amazing to me as I walked into that bookshop holding the hand of my father who had promised to get me a book of my choice for doing well in the school exams. With an illustrated edition of Alice in Wonderland under my arms, I remember coming out of the Karachi Book Company as if I was walking on a cloud. I can recollect that it was located in a crowded street behind the Saddar dispensary close to the Empress Market from where we took the bus home. Soon that bookstore closed shop. Many years later I read about this in novelist Qurratulain Hyder’s memories of her Karachi days. Looking at that congested area today and seeing one large bus-stop, nobody would believe that anything other than varieties of naswaar could ever be sold there.

Books of another kind I encountered at the Standard Book House, right opposite the Rio Cinema, which used to stock Urdu translations of Russian classics and books published in the-then Soviet Union as well as ‘Progressive’ literature. Scores of students from the medical college where I studied would walk down to the bookstore, browse and pick up books and ideas which informed our passionate debates. The Standard seemed to be a sanctuary of political freedom, for those were the days when the dreaded Ziaul Haq regime was doing its best to push the country into an intellectual blind alley. Soon the Dark Powers had a field day and the bookstore too closed shop.

I recently accompanied a group of children all excited at the prospect of watching a 3D movie in the swank new cinema hall but my steps faltered as I saw cars being double parked at the place from where I picked up those hard-bound, cheap editions of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Turgenev, not to forget Ivan Bunin whose stories my heart aches to read again.

In the Services Club shopping area, right opposite the Metropole Hotel was the Mid-town Book shop from where I bought odd volumes of Remembrance of Things Past, incomplete but enough to turn me into a life-long admirer of Proust. The Remembrance remains but beyond that... I should soon be saying where the Metropole once used to be, as it is now a building marked for demolition.

Saddar was the prime area known for its many bookstores, catering to different audiences. I remember walking by the news-stand that writer Hameed Kashmiri used to manage on the pavements of Elphinistone Street. Close-by was the rich and opulent Pak American Commercial which seemed spacious and inviting. The three-storey Sassi Bookstore opened its doors close-by but unfortunately was squeezed out by jewellery shops. Wedged between two shops on the same street was Kitab Mahal and I recollect its rather strict salesman who frowned upon idle browsing and would refuse to sell books to anybody who was not able to pronounce the name of the book or the author correctly. The orange and yellow Naya Idaara paperback editions of Manto, Bedi, Ismat and Krishan Chander I bought from there to become a life-long addict of the Urdu afsana.

Unlike these disappearing bookstores, the one which still persists is my old favourite Tits-Bits, still holding fort right next door to the Parsi Fire Temple. Conveniently located close to my school, it was easy on the pocket too as used copies of classics could be bought cheap and those which I had finished reading could be resold and the money invested in yet another book. Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck and other American modern classics I would pick from there as well as Dickens and the old Victorian masters who have never ceased to amaze me.

I have saved the best one for the last. This is Thomas and Thomas on Preedy Street which was the bastion of bookstores as it would have the latest in Penguin Classics and Picadors and it was here that one day I picked a shiny copy of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez writing about a magical town called Macondo. This was the bookstore that Muhammad Hassan Askari, Qurratulain Hyder and Mumtaz Shirin used to frequent, as well as scores of others from the city’s intelligentsia for whom it was a regular watering-hole. The bookstore lost much of its glory as Regal Chowk became known for nothing else but political demonstrations. Somewhat battered and battle-weary, the bookstore still manages to hold on to its original location but is no longer the nerve centre that it once used to be. It is the only bookstore left in the entire area. Every time I pass the area, I keep wondering how long it can hold on.

One by one the bookstores of the area have closed shop. They have followed the same path to oblivion as the coffee-shops, cinemas and even some of the other shops for which the Saddar area was known. Poor planning and crass commercialisation have taken their toll, leaving the city devoid of cultural spaces. It would be simplistic to attribute the disappearance of the city’s bookshops to a decline in the culture of reading; rather it is a sheer disregard of civic values. It is a pity that Karachi has nothing comparable with Reading in Lahore or Saeed Book Bank in Islamabad. In the name of cultural spaces, all we can think of are food streets!