The Bookshop That Let Me Read for Free
The owner pretended not to notice me finishing novels in the corner.
Mr. Ilyas sold everything in his shop except the chair in the corner, and it took me fourteen years to understand that the chair was the inventory.
The shop was called New Golden Book Depot, though nothing about it was new and the gold had retreated to the lettering on the signboard, one screw short of level. It sat in a lane too narrow for cars, between a tailor and a pharmacy, which meant its regular customers were people waiting for trousers or for medicine. I was neither. I was fourteen, newly arrived in the city because of my father's transfer, and precisely as rich as the son of a man with a transferable job and four dependents. Which is to say: I could smell books. I could not buy them.
The first time, I only meant to stand there. I picked a novel off the shelf the way you pick up someone else's baby, ready to hand it back at the first sign of trouble. I read the opening page. Then the chapter. When I looked up... forty minutes had evaporated and Mr. Ilyas was at the counter, half-moon spectacles down his nose, absorbed in a ledger with the theatrical concentration of a man who has decided not to see something.
I put the book back and fled. I came back two days later. Fled again. Came back.
This went on for a month, and here is what happened in that month, in order. First, nothing: he simply did not see me, with tremendous discipline. Then a wooden stool appeared in the corner by the window, positioned where the afternoon light fell, for no stated reason. Then, in May, when the lane turned into a furnace, a steel tumbler of water began appearing on the windowsill around the time school let out.
Nothing was ever said. That was the grammar of the whole arrangement. Kindness with an invoice is a transaction. Kindness that pretends to be furniture is something else.
The test came with Great Expectations. It was a fat orange paperback and I was two hundred pages in when the summer holidays broke our routine, and for a full week I lay at home doing sums of dread: someone will buy it, someone with actual money will walk in off the lane and buy Pip and Estella and the convict on the marshes, and I will never know how it ends. When I finally got back to the shop I went straight to the shelf... Gone.
My face must have done something spectacular, because Mr. Ilyas reached under the counter without a word and produced it. A used bus ticket poked out at my exact page.
"Somebody reserved it," he said, returning to his ledger. "Somebody with no money. Very bad customer. Sit."
I sat. I sat in that corner for four years.
I want to be careful here, because people say bookshop kindness like it is a small warm thing, a free bookmark, a smile at the till. What Mr. Ilyas ran was closer to an institution with one rule and one student at a time. The rule was delivered exactly once, when he caught me starting to fold a page corner: "Never. The book must not know you were poor. That is between you and me."
He kept a shelf marked SOLD that was not sold. I understood, years later, that it was where he parked the half-finished books of boys like me, and that I had not been the first boy, and that the bus tickets were his own, saved from his commute for exactly this purpose.
I paid in the only currencies I had. I dusted shelves without being asked. I fetched his tea from the stall at the corner, two sugars, before he could reach for his coins. On Saturdays I minded the counter for ten minutes while he prayed. None of this was ever named as payment, because naming it would have ruined the accounting. We were both pretending, and both aware of the other's pretending, and there is a particular tenderness in that arrangement that I have never found anywhere else in adult life.
In that corner I read Dickens and Manto, Agatha Christie with the covers loose, a smuggled Ismat Chughtai he slid me with a warning glance at the door. In that corner I wrote the scholarship essay that got me out of the city, in pencil, on the backs of unsold calendar pages he gave me. And then I did the thing I am still ashamed of... I left. Not rudely. Worse than rudely, vaguely. A hurried goodbye in exam season, a promise to write that dissolved the way such promises do, eleven years of intending to visit.
The Register
When I finally went back I was thirty-two and I had money, and I will confess the fantasy openly: I was going to walk in and buy an entire shelf. The grand gesture, the movie scene, the debt settled with interest while he laughed at me over the spectacles.
Half the shop was a mobile recharge counter now. The other half still had shelves, and behind the counter stood a woman in her forties who looked at me the way you look at a stranger who is staring at your walls.
Mr. Ilyas had died two winters earlier, she told me.
She was Rukhsana, his daughter. She kept the book half open because closing it felt wrong, and it lost money every single month.
I told her who I was. Corner, stool, tumbler, bus tickets. I expected polite blankness...
Instead she held up one finger, went into the back room, and returned with a long register, the cloth-bound kind, its spine gone soft as fabric. On the cover, in his careful English capitals: READERS.
Inside were columns. Date. Book. And where a shopkeeper's ledger keeps the amount, he had kept notes. She turned to 1998 and ran her finger down and there I was: "Corner boy. Dickens. Reads like eating. Will write books, inshallah."
"He kept accounts of everyone who never paid," Rukhsana said. "He told us these were the profits. We thought it was a joke. Then at the funeral, half the lane was men crying about a stool."
He sold books for a living and gave reading away for free, and he knew exactly which of the two was the business.
She would not let me buy the shelf. She let me buy one book. She chose it herself, from under the counter of the recharge side, where it had apparently lived for years: a fat orange paperback, the bus ticket still in it at page two hundred and something, the SOLD shelf's last unsold item.
He had kept it.
Through renovations and stocktaking and a whole shop shrinking around him, he had kept a boy's half-read Dickens with the place marked.
I finished it standing in the aisle of the night bus home, because it seemed right that the corner should turn out to be portable. That was his whole point, I think. He was not lending me books. He was installing the corner somewhere I could carry it.
I write for a living now, the way his register predicted, and when students at the online academy where I teach ask where I learned, I give them the truthful, useless answer: a corner, a stool, a tumbler of water. Whenever I read profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, I think of that register, a whole shelf of us listed under profit before we had written a word. And when I finally wrote about him, it came out as a poem about childhood, because that is the shelf he lives on in me, filed carefully, page never folded.
The book must not know you were poor.
It never did, Ilyas sahab. It thought I was the richest boy in the lane.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.