A silence falls over Gulistan town as darkness descends following maghreb prayers. Located in the otherwise overcrowded Marriabad town in eastern Quetta, Gulistan town is known as an affluent neighbourhood. I am here on a cold wintry November evening, headed to the Quetta Book Café, to visit the premises and speak to the owners.

Gulistan is home to two colleges, stadiums and parks, and its residents are diverse: Pashtuns, Hindus, and Bohra community members among them, but it is predominantly dominated by the Hazara.

The owners of the Quetta Book Cafe, who studied in Karachi, opened the café in December 2021, to welcome book readers and other art and literary enthusiasts, irrespective of caste, creed and ethnicity. They set out to create a space for book reading and literary programs in the café, which also contains a library.

On the day I visit, there is a group of Hazara mountaineers sitting there, enjoying their black tea in the cold weather, while two elderly Hazara, sitting next to them, are playing chess.

Inspired by the T2F Cafe in Karachi, two friends have opened a similar space in their Hazara neighbourhood in Quetta

One of the men in the cafe raises his hand to introduce himself as Ali Zaidi, one of the founders, who established the cafe with Amanullah Hazara, a lecturer at Gen Muhammad Musa Government Degree College in Quetta.

I sit with Zaidi and ask him how he and his friend came up with the idea of a book café in Quetta, where the culture of book reading seems to be dwindling.

He tells me that he and Hazara first met in 2013, when they — like other Hazara students studying in the city of Karachi — were on their way back home in a Hiace wagon to visit their respective families. They soon became fast friends and on their return to Karachi to resume their studies, spent most of their time together, the circle expanding to include other Hazaras.

Wearing a hat and jacket over a sports-trousers, Zaidi, 35, narrated the impact his nine years of studying and living in Karachi had had on him.

“When I moved to Karachi, being an introvert, I was hooked on only my chartered accountancy books all the time,” he says while holding a cup of black tea in his hand. “I was isolated and a stranger to the outer world.”

The sectarian violence the Hazaras began to face in Quetta made him seek out discussions to make sense of it all. He gravitated towards and became more interested in the world of literature, and writers in Karachi. For instance, one of the first writers he came across was Mohammed Hanif, the journalist-cum-novelist who spoke at a session at the Indus Valley School of Arts and Architecture in January 2013, called ‘I am Hazara’. This helped Zaidi come out of his comfort zone, though he admits he had trust deficit issues and thought Hanif was “an agency guy.”

“He looked like a typical Punjabi, and he talked about the state and its intelligence agencies in a scathing way,” he recalls, adding that, at the time, he believed no one could dare speak about this issue, particularly a Punjabi writer outside the province. At that time, “I thought, Hanif is their guy, and he deliberately shows up to speak against them to entice people. He could not have been alive after uttering such words against the state.”

Zaidi soon encountered T2F, a community space founded by Sabeen Mahmud in 2007, that regularly held discussions on a host of socio-political issues and arts and culture events. It also had a café and bookstore.

“When my Hazara friends and I entered the T2F for the very first time in 2013, we thought it was a pagalkhana [madhouse] kind of a place,” remembers Zaidi, adding how that day the cafe was hosting a dance as well as an open mic session. “It seemed kind of like a strange place the first time we visited, so we called it a pagalkhana.”

Zaidi brought Hazara with him the next time and soon they, along with other Hazara friends in the city, became regular visitors.

By the following year, both friends were dreaming of setting up something similar whenever they returned home to Quetta.

Gradually Zaidi and Hazara, along with other Hazara friends in Karachi, began to attend more sessions at T2F and visited other literary circles to hear other writers. They became so entangled in this web of literary circles, they tell Eos, that they dropped out of their studies. First, Zaidi dropped out from his chartered accountancy degree, in his last semester, and Hazara dropped out of his MPhil in marketing at Iqra University a year later. Zaidi kept it a secret from his family until he couldn’t.

Hazara returned to Quetta in 2016 and Zaidi followed a year later, and they decided to pursue a Master’s in Urdu literature at the University of Balochistan, which they did privately in 2018.

Hazara says they dropped out because they had lost interest in the subjects which were staid. Among other things, they had developed an interest in literature. “It wasn’t until I became an Urdu lecturer, that my family stopped complaining,” he says, adding that they are both finally content with what they are doing now.

Their time in Karachi led to valuable connections with people in the writing industry too.

“Musadiq Sanwal, then the editor of Dawn.com, started publishing me on Dawn’s Urdu website,” says Zaidi, as he scrolls through the website on his phone to find his work to show me. “At this point, I was reading Manto, Hasrat Mohani and short story writers.”

Now that they were both back in Quetta and had comp­­leted their deg­rees, they decided to turn their dream of creating a T2F-like space which could host a café and literary sessions and other programs. “It is tinier than the T2F in terms of space,” he says, but they are confident they can sustain it.

The Quetta Book Cafe is, thus, open to all. They order most of their English books from the Readings bookshop in Lahore and have designed the place like that of the Readings hall for students and visitors, to sit and study books. In the words of Zaidi, “We sell environment here, not books.”

Today, the Quetta Book Café attracts a varied crowd of visitors, especially those with an interest and passion for the arts.

Sania Khan has been a regular since the café opened. She says she spends three hours daily here with her female friends, reading and discussing topics related to literature, among other subjects. “On weekends, we try to hold sessions on literature and politics in the café, in its library,” she says. “We have had sessions on different authors, from Krishan Chander and his short stories to Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.”

Khan, a Master’s in International Relations who has a varied list of reading interests, says she recently read Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, the famed Japanese novelist. Her interest also extends to local literature including in the Balochi language. The cafe invites authors to teach visitors about Balochi language and literature too.

They chose to situate their café in a Hazara-dominated place as they are both from the community and the community did not have a space like this. Because of sectarian violence, Hazaras are often ghettoised in their towns, they say, and they wanted to change that.

Women and girls like Sania Khan feel safe in the café, and they visit on their own as the cafe’s environment is peaceful and women-friendly. “We women feel comfortable in the presence of books,” she says. “This is why we spend three hours a day here and have never faced a single issue.”

The owners like to think they have established their own pagalkhana with the Quetta Book Café. And one of the novels they have in their “madhouse” is Red Birds. This is by Mohammed Hanif, the same author they once thought was an ‘agency guy’.

“We have Red Birds in its original print,” Zaidi informs me while walking with me to the door, adding with a smile that they don’t house pirated books.

The writer is a member of staff.

He tweets @Akbar_notezai

Published in Dawn, EOS, December 11th, 2022