A treasure of papyrus

A book lover in Kolkata once said while referring to the Oxford Bookstore that "the more time spent here, the more seems to remain to be spent". Nothing can be more apt than this view, as GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN finds out.

KOLKATA adores its past. Much of the city retains the flavour of the days gone by. Much of it sports the essence of what it once was. Many of the signs have been around for decades. Some of the pavement slabs have been there for ages. And quite a few buildings have stood for a 100 years or more.

The Oxford Bookstore forms a part of this nostalgia. It has survived the ravages of time and taste. It has stood rooted on the same spot, on the same Park Street, for eight decades. Legend has it that the shop had a humble beginning on the sidewalk. Originally owned by the Primlani family of Sind, the store soon became a hot literary haunt of celebrities.

If Amartya Sen and Rajmata Gayatri Devi have stopped by, Amjad Ali Khan, Khushwant Singh, Satyajit Ray and R. P. Goenka have had a great fascination for the Oxfordian treasures. The hands of the clock, for them, stopped moving the moment they stepped in, and the world of words caught them in a spell of magic and mystery.

For a lesser mortal like me the bookstore spelt awe and amusement. Located just next to my school, I spent innumerable afternoons trying to peek into the world of Enid Blyton and her delightful child characters. I learnt of David Copperfield's wretched existence and felt remorseful. I shivered as I ran through the pages of Sherlock Holmes' adventures on the dark moor as he tracked the giant hound.

I never imagined then that I would some day write on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I never visualised that years later I would meet and talk to Ray, the man I had seen pouring over volumes of vocabulary. But the greatest surprise of it all was Motwani, the salesman who sold me books. A couple of decades after I last met him, I ran into him again. Yes, at the Oxford Bookstore. Now an advisor, he has been there for 52 years, having seen not just the changing Kolkata landscape, but also the evolving interiors of his shop.

"I came from Pakistan in 1948, and the store was very small," said Motwani. "We had always been a favourite point with intellectuals, foreigners and Indians. We stocked a variety of books: technical, general, fiction... I remember the kings of Bhutan and Thailand visiting us. Central and State ministers were regulars here, Tatas and Birlas and Goenkas too. Ray came at least three times a week."

Did they brave the wilderness - of thick vegetation, once, and of concrete and cars, now - to get to the shop? One would suppose they did.

In the 1940s and even the early 1950s, the store led a forlorn existence. There was the vast maidan in front of it that seemed almost like a jungle. There were no buildings around, and "we were afraid to walk about after sunset", Motwani muses. Now, it is the chaos of mortar and motors that one has to cut across.

But, the shop kind of sleepwalked through the 1950s, the 1960s and even the 1970s before it got on to the fast track. It was as late as 1995 that it had its first major face-lift. There were two reasons for this: to celebrate its Platinum jubilee and to mark its takeover by the Apeejay Surrendra Group.

The shop is now spread over 6000 square feet of multilevel interactive space which has benches and chairs to encourage browsing, and eventually entrap and entice one into buying something. There are the usual sections like "new age", "green point", "adventure", "travel"...

A major innovation has been the art gallery, which is the focus of cerebral exchanges. Which may arise out of an exhibition of paintings or a screening of films. M. F. Husain's anguish over censorship, and Ray's candid cinema moved and provoked the audiences, I am told.

At times, one wonders whether this is a bookstore or a library or an auditorium, what with the tea bar at one corner adding spirit and spice to the eye and the mind.

"We are very much a books people", Oxford's Chief Operating Officer, Anuradha Jairam, avers. "The beverage, the seats and the shows are all meant to encourage men and women to linger around. Browsing often leads to buying. At other times, it is excellent publicity. Some one may walk into our shop to watch a play- reading, but may end up thumbing through a book and talking about it to a friend, who will buy it."

Possibly so. "I would use a more positive word here", Jairam smiles. "Probably so... And I have a good reason for saying this. We have rare books in literature and art that will be difficult to find elsewhere. My customers tell me that works that they could not get in Mumbai or New Delhi are available here."

This mix of rare and regular titles rubs shoulders with the mouse. Surfing the net is a perfect alternative to browsing the book. An internet station at the premises panders to the click clique.

Yet, the place is still known for its paper and print. And as the eye wanders from page to page, it is hard to miss the creativity between the covers of the Oxford Bookstore.

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