QUETTA: Abdul Khaliq has a wish. He wants to be visible. Here in Quetta’s Millennium Mall, another temple to our millennial anxieties about acquisition and looks, Khaliq’s need to be noticed should be perfectly at home with the blooming narcissi that thrive in the sunless human-aquariums of modern malls.

Khaliq wants to be seen not for his looks but the wares he brings. He is 59, elfin and missing two front teeth. He doesn’t stop every now and then for selfies. He only wants people to stop amidst their frenzied forays up and down the elevators, and browse through his books. Just stop and do that. They don’t necessarily have to buy, but maybe they will come to love them if only they leafed through one.

“If you stop reading, you will regress to basic literacy in no time even if you have a Master’s degree,” he says.

Forty years selling books in Karachi, Khaliq would also be familiar to folks from Lahore as the slightly eccentric bookseller. He went around the city with a mobile library on a motorbike rickshaw. Now in Quetta, he wants to be “seen to promote a culture of reading”.

To be visible, Khaliq has a plan: a book stall in the basement and two shops above. That should make it hard for anyone to miss him.

Along comes a woman with her little daughter, drifting from the nearby snack-bar to Khaliq’s table of books. The child, shawarma roll in hand, wants a children’s book. The mother refuses to buy it. “Let it go. I know you will never read it.” As one might ask many parents, does she know that storybooks are not textbooks?

In Millennium Mall, the stereotype that women love shopping risks being reinforced. There are more women than men outside in the streets and shops. But what would a bored, homebound woman in tribal Balochistan do if not go in for a bit of retail therapy? The shopkeepers know this. They stock up with women’s garments and accessories. Women come to lose themselves on the sanitized floors of this consumers’ citadel, secured by gun-toting guards. Men, they go everywhere.

In flowing black abayas, a woman and her three daughters descend on Khaliq’s stall — a pack of ravens, pecking books. One of the girls casually picks up The Reluctant Fundamentalist and then puts it right back. She asks for water. Khaliq goes to get some. Before he returns, they drift off, drawn to bright trinkets displayed on an open stall by the elevator-shaft.

Khaliq sits down and drinks the water himself. He says he read the Diwan-e-Ghalib when he was ten. At 16, he had 300 books with which he started his book business. “Our dilemma is that our forefathers were not literate,” he says. “We will buy a TV for every room, a mobile phone for every kid, but to own a library is beyond our comprehension.”

Khaliq’s is a risky plan for he sells no trinkets. He sells no pizza or sweetcorn, the scent of which lace the air with their omnipresence. He has bought an extra shop on the second floor to turn into a book warehouse. That would be Rs42,000/- in rent for this stall in the basement and the two shops upstairs. Does he think he will break even, let alone make a profit, from selling books here?

“I am basically a mad man,” he says, grinning gap-toothedly. “If you must do something, might as well give it your best shot.”

The book I saw yesterday at his shop on the second floor is gone. Khaliq says he hasn’t sold any, so it must be there. He was down here all day yesterday working on the stall in the basement for shoppers to see there is a bookseller at the Millennium.

He takes me up there. I worry that he is leaving his bookstall below unattended.

“In a city where no one reads, you don’t have to fear book thieves,” says Khaliq, the sage. It must be all the books he read as a boy.

Later that day, I see him gliding down the elevator like a messiah on water, steps rippling beneath him like waves. With him he brings his slate — a sheet of plain white paper — to write a commandment. With a black marker, he writes on the paper:

Aap apnay aur apnay bachon ki jismani sihat kay liye achhi khorak laytay hain.
Aap apnay aur apnay bachon ki khubsoorati kay liye achhay kapray laytay hain.
Aap apnay aur apnay bachon ki zahni nashonoma aur khubsoorti kay liye kiya kar rahay hain?

[“You buy food for yourselves and the children to have a healthy body.

“You buy nice clothes so they can look attractive.

“What are you doing to make their minds healthy and beautiful?”]

In his sales pitch, Khaliq is still absent. There is no mention of books. But he is there in the Millennium, an invisible man cloaked in good intentions. Try spotting him the next time you go there. He may have a book for you.

Published in Dawn, September 8th, 2017