The Bookstall Under the Bridge
Secondhand pages, third-hand wisdom, and the seller who curated my youth.
Iqbal bhai sold me my entire education for roughly the price of a bicycle, spread over nine years, under a flyover that leaked when it rained. He could quote Ghalib, Neruda, and the returns policy of every publisher in Delhi, and he arranged his stall by mood, not alphabet.
The stall sat under the Yusuf Sarai flyover, a blue tarpaulin, six wooden crates, and maybe eight hundred books at any given time, breathing exhaust fumes all day. Secondhand book shopping in that city was supposed to happen at the famous Sunday bazaar, the one tourists photograph.
Iqbal bhai's stall was not famous. It was better.
The bazaar sold you what you asked for. Iqbal bhai sold you what you needed, which is a different profession entirely.
I found him when I was fourteen, bunking tuition with forty rupees and no plan. I asked for a physics guide because that is what boys like me were supposed to ask for. He looked at me for a long moment over his spectacles, handed me a physics guide, and then slid a slim, water-stained collection of Faiz on top of it.
“Free,” he said. “The physics is forty. The Faiz is homework.”
I want to be honest... I did not fall in love with poetry that afternoon.
I fell in love with being seen.
A grown man had looked at a skinny fourteen-year-old in a school uniform and decided he was the kind of person who gets assigned Faiz. I read the whole book that night mostly to deserve the look.
The poetry came later, but it came.
The Curriculum
For nine years, Iqbal bhai ran what I now understand was a private university with one student at a time and a fee structure based on vibes. Books he thought you needed were discounted. Books he thought were beneath you cost extra, as a tax on your bad taste. He once charged me double for a bestselling thriller and then refunded the difference a month later when I admitted it was terrible. “Fine,” he said, pocketing his glasses. “Tuition returned. Lesson kept.”
He had rules. Never buy a book with an unbroken spine from him, because an unread book has no witnesses. Always read the margins first, because the previous owner is the free second author. He taught me to hunt for pencil notes the way other people hunt first editions. My copy of a Kamala Das collection has, next to a poem about a loveless marriage, a stranger's shaky ballpoint: my mother, exactly. I have owned that book for twenty years and I still cannot read that page without company.
His stock came from dead men's libraries, mostly. Families would sell a lifetime of books by the kilo after a funeral, and Iqbal bhai would ransack the sacks like a customs officer, pulling out the underlined ones. Third-hand wisdom, he called it. The author knew something, the dead reader knew something about what the author knew, and now you, the third hand, inherit both.
When I started writing my own poems at sixteen, terrible ones, he was the first person I told. He did not ask to read them, which I resented for a decade and now recognise as mercy. Instead he started slipping craft into the curriculum: a beaten-up rhyming dictionary, essays on metre, a biography of Manto with the spine held together by electrical tape. Everything I later paid real institutions to teach me, and everything I eventually found laid out properly when I finally enrolled in lessons on the craft, Iqbal bhai had already smuggled to me under a flyover for loose change.
What He Kept
When I was nineteen, my father's business failed. It failed the way these things fail, slowly... and then all at once, and in the all-at-once part, things left our house. The scooter. My mother's second set of gold bangles. And my books, four cartons of them, sold by weight one Tuesday while I was at college, because paper was paper and the kabadiwala paid cash.
I did not speak to my father for a month.
It was the only cruelty of his life, and he committed it out of shame, and we never once discussed it before he died. If you have ever lost a library you know it is a strange, unrespectable grief. You cannot mourn paper out loud. People remind you that books can be rebought, the way people who have never owned a dog explain that dogs can be replaced.
I stopped going to the stall. Could not afford to... and could not bear to.
Three years passed.
I graduated, got the kind of job that pays for headphones, moved across the city, and one October evening in my twenty-third year I found myself near Yusuf Sarai with an hour to kill and walked to the flyover the way you press a bruise.
The tarpaulin was still blue. Iqbal bhai was greyer, smaller, arguing with a customer about Premchand. When he saw me... he did not say hello. He held up one finger, finished the argument, went to the back crate, the one he sat on, and pulled out a jute sack with my name on a cardboard tag.
Inside were eleven books. My books.
My handwriting aged fourteen to nineteen in the margins, my name misspelled by my own younger hand on a flyleaf, the Faiz he had given me free with its water stain shaped like Australia.
“The kabadiwala who bought your cartons sells to me sometimes,” he said. “Four years ago I opened a sack and my own homework fell out. I knew the margins.” He shrugged, as if recognising one boy's pencil among a city of dead men's libraries was nothing. “Most of the cartons were gone. These eleven I found. I knew you would come when your feet healed.”
He had been keeping my childhood in a jute sack under a flyover, sorted and waiting, because a bookseller's real inventory is his readers.
He would not take money for them. He charged me, instead, one poem. Written, not spoken, on the spot, on the back of a receipt pad, while trucks made the flyover hum above us. It was about my father, and it was the first honest thing I ever wrote about him, years before I could write about forgiveness properly, and Iqbal bhai read it twice, nodded once, and filed it in a crate between two strangers.
“Now you are stock,” he said. “Third-hand wisdom. Somebody will find you.”
The stall is gone now. The corporation cleared the flyover vendors in 2021, and Iqbal bhai's nephew tells me the old man sells from home in Batla House, to customers who know to knock. I keep meaning to go... I keep not going, and I have stopped pretending I do not know why: some libraries you only get to lose once, and I would rather owe him a visit than pay my last one.
But the eleven books sit on their own shelf in my flat, out of alphabetical order, arranged by mood. And somewhere in a crate in Batla House, if the nephew is telling the truth, there is a receipt pad page with my handwriting on it, waiting under some other tarpaulin for a skinny fourteen-year-old who asked for a physics guide.
I hope it costs him nothing. I hope the look costs him the rest of his life.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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