I will try!

It was the book shop I went to visit in Bag Bazar after many years.

Earlier I lived in Exhibition road area and often went to this shop for it had a good collection of fiction, non-fiction and other books of general interest.

It was a unique shop in this regard as all other shops in Bag Bazar and Putli Sadak area mostly sold text books as there were so many university campuses around and the roads remain crowded with students throughout the day and evening.

The students were often also smartly- clad-in-dress students of a women’s college in the area. When you are young you want to be around such company hoping to make an acquaintance with a suitable woman.

It was a time when Late Princess Shruti, the only daughter of King Birendra, too studied in that campus. However, it was said that she came and left in a car and only her closest friends had a time to look at her and talk to her. Only a few people ever claimed to have seen her at the campus.

The bookseller running the shop was an elderly man with a kind face. He often was himself reading a book silently. He barely smiled at a customer who entered his shop before his gaze returned to the book he was reading.

He did not mind if a customer lingered long in his shop and browsed through many books before he left the shop without buying any. He just smiled again at him while he left.

He smoked often on his seat when he took a break from his reading. So in his shop there was always a residual reek of tobacco all the time.

Mixing with the scent of books and glue it formed an aroma I liked, while I leisurely perused the books I took out from shelves one by one. I carefully placed each of them back from where I had taken them as I did not want to bother the seller with any additional work on account of my visit to his shop.

It was from here that I purchased many titles of Charles Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, V S Naipaul and many others. Those titles still remain with me after more than twenty years. Finding Diary of the last Indian Viceroy Lord Mountbatain and the stories of Gay De Maupassant were some spectacular discoveries I made at that shop. These writers enriched my world tremendously. I kept rereading their work as they answered best my anxieties in different stages of my life.

I also bought from here many books which I abandoned too. One such book was by a classical English writer half of which was written in Greek between English.

With the time however, my reading became diverse like the contents of my life. I had now my wife and children who were growing up fast demanding a great deal of my time and other resources.

Also, I shifted to a locality in the south of Kathmandu which had lower house rent and from where Bag Bazar appeared too far away and the Himalayan Mountains glittered in the north every morning as the sun rose. It all occupied me so totally that I was almost under a spell to only focus on the urgent matters and not to indulge.

So I did not go to this shop for a long time.

Finding the garlanded framed photo of the bookseller just above his seat was deeply saddening. His son, sitting on his seat, on asking informed me that a few years back his father passed away and since then he has been looking after the shop.

He just smiled as I said sorry at it. Then I went to look for a few titles inside the shop.

I found that now this shop had so many titles from Nepali authors too who wrote both in Nepali and English. Beside now it sold many text books too.

Many of the books were on a heavy discount. Among them I found a book which was a collection of articles from a journalist who wrote routinely for newspapers in older days. It was a collection of those articles.

I was never a big fan of his writing and mostly ignored his columns which appeared on every weekend issue of The Rising Nepal on Fridays and other newly arrived English dailies and weeklies. He then had a good following and readers were found talking about his columns in a social gathering.

I had heard some time before about the death of that columnist. He had lived to the age beyond seventy writing his scandalous columns almost till the end while living a life mostly supported by business and political interests he promoted in his writing, rather than by his writing.

Now finding his book in my hand at a discounted price my heart filled with ambiguity. I knew his name so well that I could not ignore his presence in the book shop. By his admirers he was possibly entirely forgotten as his book had no takers and it was on a discount.

I decided to buy his book less for reading more for keeping as a souvenir.

In a way it will help me to invoke the nostalgia of the age which is slipping away slowly for those too who have survived it, not to mention those who have passed on with it.

For the ever changing dynamics of time has demolished many old structures and has created so many new landmarks at their place that one feels at a loss while seeing a familiar old city disappearing and a new one emerging which has no sign of the one that has been replaced. It is largely true for the people too.

In such a tumultuous age, may be, only a writer one was familiar with, could help one relive the age which seems so distant now.

It was my love for the form not the content that I decided to buy the book, which had brought together me as a reader, him as a columnist and the book seller who sold his work. We were complete strangers otherwise.

Before I left the shop the son of the late book seller asked me to visit again. He was neither a smoker nor a reader—I had noticed. His eyes were restless, besides. He was a man very different from his father.

I said I will Try.

K C Bhatt