On Finding Books, Readers and the Lives They Leave Behind: Notes on Reading The Sunday Book Bazaar by Kanupriya Dhingra

There are some places where we learn to read long before we understand that reading is something we are learning. For me, one of those places was a pavement in Daryaganj, where, on winter Sundays, my grandfather would take me to look at books. 

I must have been about ten. Delhi winters had a particular quality then, at least in my memory. The morning air was cold enough to make you want to stay wrapped up, but the sun would eventually arrive and settle over the old city with a gentleness that made wandering possible. The Sunday Book Bazaar was already busy when we reached it. I remember the smell of old paper, the dust, the crowds, and the peculiar intimacy of people sitting or crouching around piles of books, searching with the concentration of people who had come looking for something they could not entirely describe. The pavement had ceased to be a pavement. For a few hours, it became a bookshop without walls. 

My grandfather had a few favourite book-sellers, so we usually went to them first. They knew him, and they knew that the little girl accompanying him would inevitably make her way towards the children's books. They would point me towards the appropriate stack and allow me to choose whatever caught my attention. There was no bargaining. According to my grandfather, the important thing was to arrive early, before the best books disappeared into other people's bags. 

I did not understand then that he was teaching me something about reading. 

But my grandfather did something more important than introducing me to particular authors. He introduced me to the pleasure of looking. He took me somewhere without telling me exactly what I ought to find. Years later, when I was a bored teenager spending far too much time at home, he gave me his membership card for the British Library, which felt like another kind of invitation. Until then, the world of books I knew had been shaped largely by libraries, second-hand markets, and whatever happened to find its way into our home. Suddenly, there seemed to be an almost limitless world beyond it: writers from countries I had never visited, books I had never heard of, lives and landscapes that could be entered simply by sitting down and reading. I don't remember him explaining the significance of what he was giving me. He simply handed me the card, much as he had once taken me to Daryaganj and allowed me to choose. Looking back, I realise that this may have been his particular way of introducing me to the world: not by telling me what to read, but by quietly making more of it available to me. 

I have been thinking about that distinction while reading Kanupriya Dhingra's The Sunday Book Bazaar, a book that begins with a particular market in Old Delhi but gradually opens into a much larger meditation on books, readers, public space, and the strange ways in which literary lives are formed. Dhingra traces the history of the Daryaganj Sunday market, its connections to the older book cultures of Shahjahanabad, its booksellers and readers, its legal battles, and eventual relocation to Mahila Haat. But what stayed with me was not simply the history of a market. It was the recognition that places such as Daryaganj have always done something that is difficult to account for in conventional histories of literature: they have created readers. 

We tend to think of literary education as something that happens in institutions. There are schools and universities, libraries and publishing houses, literary festivals and book clubs, all the visible structures through which reading becomes part of a culture. We speak of authors and critics, scholars and editors, and we have become accustomed to measuring literary seriousness through a vocabulary of credentials. 

Much of my own reading life was formed elsewhere, among books that had already belonged to somebody else, in libraries that did not ask me what I was studying, and on pavements where thousands of books were piled together without much concern for the hierarchies that the literary world likes to impose upon them. 

And that is one of the reasons I have always loved second-hand books. A new book arrives without a past. It is waiting for you to begin. A second-hand book carries evidence that somebody has already begun and, at some point, stopped. There may be a name on the first page, a date, an old library stamp, an underline beneath a sentence, a note in the margin, a forgotten receipt, or a piece of paper that has somehow survived between its pages. Sometimes the traces are so faint that they tell us almost nothing, and yet the knowledge that another person once held the same book is enough to alter the experience of reading it. I have often thought of these traces as secret messages from the universe, not because I necessarily believe that every coincidence has been arranged for us, but because books make us unusually receptive to them. 

I remember finding R.K. Narayan's The Talkative Man at Daryaganj when I was a child. I wasn't looking for it. I loved R.K. Narayan, and I had been called the talkative person at home for as long as I could remember, so perhaps the title itself was enough to make me stop. But there was something else. Inside the book was a date connected to a journey to Madras, exactly eighty years before the day on which I found it. It was an entirely ordinary coincidence, the kind of detail that would mean nothing to anyone else, but I remember feeling that the book had somehow found me rather than the other way around. I was not searching for The Talkative Man. It had simply appeared in a pile in front of a child who happened to be called talkative and happened to love its author. 

There are moments in a reader's life when the distinction between coincidence and meaning becomes almost impossible to maintain. 

Years later, in 2007, I found another second-hand book at a time when I needed it much more than I knew a book could be needed. I had lost my job and was forced to take a sabbatical in a tiny village near Vijayawada, where I spent about a year trying to understand what came next. At some point during that period, I had begun to think that perhaps this really was the end of the life I had imagined for myself. Then I found a Paulo Coelho book. Inside it, someone had written a short note: It is not THE END. 

I have never known who wrote those words, or when, or why. Maybe the note had nothing to do with the circumstances in which I found it. Or maybe it had been written years earlier by somebody going through an entirely different crisis. Yet it reached me at precisely the moment when I needed to hear it. The book itself contained an introduction by Coelho in which he spoke about being unlawfully fired because of office politics and how that experience eventually led him towards writing and, ultimately, towards the life he was meant to live. I was reading about someone who had lost one life and found another while standing in the uncertain space between the two. 

I still have that book. It has been nineteen years. I have moved through several versions of myself since then, and the book has moved with me. I consider it one of my talismans, not because I imagine that it possesses any supernatural power, but because there are objects to which we attach memories so completely that throwing them away would feel like discarding a piece of our own history. The book came to me already carrying someone else's words, and I added my own circumstances to them. In that sense, it became more than a book by Paulo Coelho. It became a record of one particular moment in my life, preserved between the covers of a book that had already belonged to someone else. 

This is the peculiar intimacy of second-hand books. They have lives before they enter ours, and sometimes they leave traces of those lives behind. 

Dhingra's book brought that feeling back to me because the Sunday Book Bazaar itself seems to have been built upon this constant movement of books between people. Textbooks left behind by students, comics passed from one generation to another, old magazines, rare editions, pirated bestsellers, books from discarded libraries, books whose original owners may have forgotten them entirely: the market gathered together the remnants of other people's reading and made them available for another beginning. There is something deeply democratic about that. 

A second-hand market does not insist that literature arrive in a particular order. It can place a great novel beside a terrible one, a canonical author beside someone whose name has almost disappeared, serious literature beside pulp, philosophy beside romance, children's books beside academic texts. There is no obvious hierarchy governing the piles. A book does not need to announce its importance before somebody is allowed to pick it up. 

This is also why the booksellers themselves interest me so much. I have met many booksellers in these markets, and what has always surprised me is the depth of their knowledge. They may not possess the literary education that we conventionally associate with expertise. They may not have studied literature formally, written criticism, or belonged to the circles in which literary knowledge is usually performed. And when you ask them about books, many of them become extraordinary repositories of memory. They know authors, genres, and readers. They know which books people come looking for and which obscure title has suddenly become difficult to find. They remember tastes. They recognise returning customers. They can recommend something unexpectedly good, and they often know stories about books and authors that one would be unlikely to find in a catalogue. 

Once, in College Street in Kolkata, I was looking for Amit Chaudhuri's books. I mentioned it to one of the booksellers, who called out to another. There was a brief conversation, and then I was asked to wait for ten minutes. When he returned, he had a stack of seventeen titles. Seventeen books had somehow been assembled for a reader who had walked in asking for one writer. What struck me was not simply the efficiency of it, but the knowledge behind it. There was no algorithm trying to determine what else I might like. There was no publishing database being consulted. There was simply an accumulated familiarity with books and with the people who come looking for them. 

It has also made me question the way we use the word literary. There is a particular kind of literary gatekeeping that I have encountered in my own life, especially because I came to writing and publishing from a non-writing background. I have seen people snigger at wrong pronunciations, at unfamiliarity with certain references, at the inability to dress or speak according to the codes of literary spaces. Sometimes the assumption seems to be that if you have not grown up inside literature, you cannot possibly understand it in the right way. 

But what does it mean to understand literature in the right way?

 

The bookseller who has spent decades watching readers come in with lists and leave with unexpected discoveries may have a different kind of literary knowledge from the person who has spent years studying literature formally. One is not necessarily superior to the other, but I sometimes think we are too quick to recognise the second and dismiss the first. We have become very good at recognising credentials and rather less good at recognising knowledge that has accumulated quietly through experience. 

The booksellers I have known are often careful about their opinions, too. They recommend without insisting, knowing that readers can be fiercely attached to their authors. They may tell you that they don't think you will enjoy a particular writer, but there is usually a generosity in the way they say it. They have learned, through years of watching people browse, that reading is intimate. A book that seems terrible to one person may have rescued another. In a way, they seem to understand something that literary culture sometimes forgets: readers do not necessarily need to be told what is good. They need to be given the freedom to discover what matters to them. That freedom is one of the great pleasures of a book bazaar. 

In a conventional bookstore, the choices have already been shaped by publishing, distribution, shelf space, and demand. Popular books occupy more visible positions. New releases are promoted. Categories are clearly marked. A bookstore is designed, quite reasonably, to help us find what we are looking for. The second-hand market offers something else. It allows us to find what we were not looking for. 

That distinction has mattered to me throughout my life. I grew up reading voraciously, and second-hand markets and libraries were, in many ways, the only reason I could read as much as I did. I could wander into a market without knowing what I wanted and still come away with something that opened a new door. I could take a chance on a book because it was inexpensive. I could encounter an author without having first been told that the author was important. There was room for mistakes, and mistakes are an underrated part of becoming a reader. 

Some of the books we encounter in such places will be wonderful. Others will be terrible. Some will be forgotten almost immediately. Some will remain with us for decades. But the act of looking matters because it allows reading to remain a form of exploration rather than a sequence of approved choices. I think this is particularly important for children and young readers. 

My grandfather did not give me a list of books that a serious reader ought to have read. He took me to Daryaganj and let me choose. Later, he gave me his British Library membership card, opening up an entirely different universe of books when I was a bored teenager at home. Between those two gestures was a philosophy of reading that I only understood much later- curiosity first, classification later. The book market became part of that education. So did the cities in which I encountered similar places. 

Daryaganj has always existed in my imagination alongside College Street in Kolkata and the second-hand book markets around Churchgate in Mumbai. They are not identical, of course. Each belongs to its city, its languages, and its literary culture. College Street has an extraordinary relationship with Bengali literature and with generations of writers, students, intellectuals, and political figures who grew up around it. The long road, the bookshops on either side, and the tram tracks running through the middle create a landscape in which books are not an interruption to the city but one of its natural features. Still, the experience feels familiar. 

These markets belong to the same species of place. They form, in my mind, an unofficial literary geography of India, one that does not always appear in histories of literature but is visible to anyone willing to follow the books. It runs through pavements and old markets, through shops that have survived for generations and stalls assembled for a Sunday morning, through discarded libraries and collections that have changed hands. The languages and authors vary, but the underlying exchange remains the same: books move from one life to another. 

The relocation of the Daryaganj market to Mahila Haat felt so heavy to me, even though I have not visited the new location. Some places become so deeply embedded in memory that their physical disappearance feels disproportionate to what has actually happened. A market can move, but memory is not so easily relocated. The pavement matters because it was on that pavement that generations of readers learned to browse, bargain, crouch beside piles of books, and discover things they had not come looking for. 

There are practical realities, of course. Informal markets create difficulties for cities. Public spaces have competing claims. Booksellers have precarious livelihoods. The romance of a pavement book market can sometimes conceal the uncertainty of the people who depend upon it. It would be too easy to turn the story into one more familiar opposition between a beautiful past and an uncaring present. 

However, the question Dhingra's book raises is more interesting than whether the market should have remained exactly where it was. It is worth asking what a city loses when it removes the kinds of spaces that do not fit neatly into its official understanding of culture. 

A book market does not merely sell books. It creates encounters between strangers. It allows a child to browse without knowing what she is looking for. It allows a student to buy a book she could not otherwise afford. It allows a collector to find something thought lost. It allows a bookseller to become an unofficial literary guide. It allows an old book to acquire another reader. None of these things are particularly easy to measure, though culture is full of things that are difficult to measure. 

We tend to think of literary institutions as the places where literature is preserved and transmitted. Yet sometimes literature survives through much messier systems. Through booksellers who refuse to throw things away. Through readers who cannot bear to part with their collections until circumstance forces them to. Through libraries and footpaths. Through books passed between friends and strangers. Through the anonymous person who writes four words on the first page of a used book and has no idea that, years later, those words will become a lifeline for somebody else. The Sunday Book Bazaar belongs to that world. 

Reading Dhingra's account made me think about how little of my own reading life can be separated from these places. I have been reading since I was four. Books have accompanied me through childhood and adolescence, through the ordinary boredom of being young, and through much darker periods when they became something closer to survival guides. I cannot imagine the person I became without the books I found in libraries and second-hand markets, or without the peculiar freedom those places gave me to encounter literature without first being told what I ought to think of it. 

The idea of the book bazaar matters to me beyond nostalgia. It represents a version of reading that is increasingly difficult to preserve, where I was reading without an itinerary. The reader does not arrive with an algorithmically generated list. There is no guarantee of relevance. There is no assurance that the next book will resemble the previous one. 

You look through a pile, become distracted, pick something up, read the first page, notice a name, remember another author, follow a completely irrational association, and eventually find yourself carrying home a book you had not known existed an hour earlier. That kind of wandering is not inefficient. It is how curiosity works. 

The deepest gift of second-hand book markets is that they allow books to remain unpredictable, and that is why the people who sell them matter as much as the books themselves. They are part of the ecology of discovery. They know that a reader is not always looking for information. Sometimes a reader is looking for recognition. Sometimes for escape. Sometimes for a book that will make a difficult year bearable. Sometimes, without knowing it, for four words written by a stranger nineteen years earlier. 

*-*-*

I often think about that note in my Paulo Coelho book more often than I would have expected. It is not THE END. I have no idea what the original reader meant by it. I may never know whether it was written for someone else, for themselves, or simply as a line they happened to like. And that uncertainty is part of its meaning now. The book has passed through at least two lives, and the sentence acquired a different meaning each time. This is what books do when we allow them to circulate. They accumulate us. The person who underlined a sentence becomes part of the book's history. So does the person who bought it years later. So does the reader who discovers it in a market and carries it home. 

A second-hand book is therefore never entirely second-hand. It is carrying forward a conversation that began before us, often without our knowing who the earlier participants were. When I look back at the Sunday mornings of my childhood, I remember the pavement more than the individual books. I remember the dust and the smell of old paper, the crowds, the piles, and my grandfather's familiarity with particular booksellers. I remember being allowed to choose. 

At ten, I did not understand how extraordinary that freedom was. I do now. My grandfather gave me access to books in two very different ways. First, he took me to a pavement in Daryaganj and allowed me to discover what was there. Later, he handed me his British Library membership card and allowed me to discover what lay beyond the world I already knew. In retrospect, the gestures feel connected. 

Both were invitations into a larger world, without instructions about how I was supposed to inhabit it. And somehow in my mind, this is what the best reading education looks like. Not a prescription, but an opening. Not being told which books will matter, but being given enough freedom to find out for yourself. This may be what makes the disappearance of places like the old Daryaganj bazaar feel like more than an urban change.

When a city loses a place where books can be encountered casually, inexpensively, and without hierarchy, it loses one of the informal ways in which readers are made. It loses a little of the possibility of accidental discovery, of the child who picks up the wrong book and discovers the right author, of the student who finds a book she could never have afforded new, of the bookseller who remembers a title that nobody else remembers, of the reader who opens an old volume and finds a sentence that seems to have travelled across years specifically to reach them. 

I sometimes wish I had taken more photographs of the places I have loved for books. Maybe I had assumed they would always be there. Daryaganj would continue to exist on Sundays. College Street would continue to stretch along its tram tracks while the booksellers would remain among their piles. There would always be another weekend, another city, another market, another chance to browse. 

Cities have a way of reminding us that permanence is an illusion. Books are perhaps more forgiving. They survive moves and evictions, changes of ownership, and changes of taste. They travel from libraries to houses, from houses to booksellers, from booksellers to strangers. They wait in piles. They acquire dust. They lose their covers. They acquire annotations. They are forgotten and then rediscovered. And every once in a while, one of them finds the person who needs it. That, more than anything, is what I carried away from Kanupriya Dhingra's The Sunday Book Bazaar. 

The book made me think about the market as a cultural institution, certainly, but also about the institutions that have shaped readers like me, grandparents who open doors without making a ceremony of it, booksellers who know more than their credentials suggest, libraries that offer a bored teenager an entire world, and second-hand books whose previous lives become part of our own. I have spent much of my life looking for books in places like these. 

At my heart, I am still that ten-year-old crouching beside a pile in Daryaganj, waiting to see what catches my attention. The cities have changed, the books have changed, the reading preferences have changed, and I have certainly changed, but the pleasure remains remarkably similar. 

There is still something wonderful about not knowing what you are going to find. The best books I have encountered have rarely been the ones I was determined to find. They have been the ones that appeared when I was looking for something else, the ones that arrived carrying traces of strangers, the ones that seemed insignificant until some sentence inside them suddenly became necessary. 

Maybe that is the real inheritance of a place like the Sunday Book Bazaar. It is not simply a market for old books, nor even a monument to a particular reading culture. It is a reminder that books have lives beyond the moment they are published, and that readers are made in all sorts of places that literary history rarely remembers. Sometimes in classrooms, certainly. Sometimes in libraries. Sometimes in the homes of people who love books. And sometimes on a pavement in Old Delhi, where a child is handed a pile and told, without anyone saying so explicitly, that she is free to choose. I think I have been choosing ever since.