A Time-Travelling Bookstore

Every once in a while, I like to write about places I have been to, places that have left a strong impact on me. These can be places with overwhelming natural beauty, or places that are steeped in the richness of culture or history, or just places that spoke to me for one reason or another. Today, I walked into one such place, a place not of towering mountains or history-soaked temples but a bookstore—small, cramped, and stubborn—in the heart of an upscale Delhi market. Faqir Chand and Sons, lodged in a quiet corner of Khan Market, does not announce itself with neon signs or grand displays. It simply is. It stands there, watching, as the glassy storefronts rise around it, as new money and new tastes rush past its narrow wooden door. It has watched the world change, and yet, it refuses to.

It was established in 1931 in Peshawar, in present-day Pakistan. When the partition came and India was still piecing itself together in the wake of the horror that followed, Mr. Faqir Chand fled to New Delhi and set up his store in 1951, from scratch, in Khan Market, which was established to rehabilitate the trader refugees from the NWFP (North-West Frontier Province). He sat in this very space once, guiding hands toward Kipling and Premchand, toward Ghalib and Vivekananda. Now, his 28 year old great-grandson, Abhinav Bahmi, keeps watch, carrying forward something that is more inheritance than profession.

The shop is small, the kind of small that forces strangers to brush shoulders, to murmur apologies, to negotiate like travellers on a narrow road. Today, for reasons known only to the shopkeeper, yellow chrysanthemums sit in unexpected corners, bright and out of place among the rows of books that have grown comfortable in their dust. Hand-drawn sketches and post-its scribbled with minute writing are pinned up on the walls wherever a gap remains. A stranded Van Gogh’s Starry Night print pinned up high in a corner catches my eye briefly.

The books are piled right up to the ceiling in no particular order or genre and they lean against one another like old friends in a conspiratorial huddle. Some teeter at dangerous angles, wedged into every available space. The dust has settled in the crevices of their spines, undisturbed by the sterile efficiency of modern booksellers. Here, literature is not stocked; it is stored, hoarded, cherished. 

There are no neat sections here, no crisp dividers to tell you what belongs where, and old and new books are all thrown together. A dog-eared Malgudi Days rests against a crisp, untouched Anna Karenina. A pile of Ruskin Bond essays leans against a stack of old Delhi guidebooks, their pages yellowed like parchment, their maps outdated but still carrying the weight of old roads, old names.

Tucked inside a worn copy of The Old Man and the Sea is a note in slanted, hurried handwriting: “This one will break your heart, but gently.” I pull a secondhand Graham Greene from its crowded nest and open it, only to find another note, this one written in the careful, deliberate strokes of someone who still believed in the permanence of ink: “For Kabir, so you never forget the city we loved.” There are others—underlined passages in Austen, folded corners in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

It stops me, just for a moment, just long enough for a thought to form—how many people have left pieces of themselves in books? How many hands have turned these pages, how many eyes have paused at the same sentence, how many lives have brushed against these stories like strangers passing in a crowded street? The books themselves tell stories, not just the ones printed on their pages but the ones carried in their creases, their wear, their hurried scribbles in margins. 

The men who work here—keepers more than sellers—know their stock like a shepherd knows his flock. “Looking for something particular?” one of them asked, his voice thick with the patience of a man who has spent years watching the world pass by through the same shop window.

“Just browsing,” I said, though I knew that was a lie. One does not come to a place like this just to browse. One comes to remember. 

Legacy bookstores are strange things. They stand at the edges of history, waiting for readers who still believe in the weight of a book, the crack of a spine, the scent of ink. There are fewer and fewer places like this left. The world does not have patience for them anymore. Replaced by the efficiency of online sellers, the convenience of algorithmic recommendations, and the polished sterility of chain stores where books are stacked neatly, obediently, without personality or protest. 

I leave the shop with a single purchase, a copy of The Indian Epics Retold by R.K. Narayan. It was not the book I had come looking for, but then again, it never is in a place like this. I step out into the noisy street, the bright and modern world pressing in from all sides. The air is thick with the scent of perfumes and fresh cookies from nearby bakeries, with the hum of conversation, with the restless urgency of a city always moving forward. The little bookstore stands as it always had, unbothered, unchanged, as though it knows something—a story, a history—that the rest of us have forgotten.

All images are self-clicked.