When books provided a haven against bullets

Chandigarh was a different city in the eighties. There were no bicycle lanes but we cycled everywhere. One day, we would reach the damning ratio of having more cars than people but it was not then. There were no cafes or restaurants with food from all over the world. You could drink coffee at the Indian Coffee House, or eat out at Lyons for “continental”, Kwality or Ghazal for Indian and Hong Kong for Chinese food. The Archie comics aficionados could get a burger and an ice-cream soda at Hot Millions. The city parks were filled with impromptu cricket or football games. Television was not on our agenda every day. We had fewer options but we were not bereft.

Much changed as militancy, riots, and terrorism entered our vocabulary. An inheritance of political disturbance, from Partition to the Emergency, had always lingered over Punjab but Operation Blue Star, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the ensuing anti-Sikh Riots ushered in a different era of vastly increased policing. Whether you were against the government or working for it, religiously affiliated or not, no one was immune to the violence that beset the region.

But even in that uncertain time, Chandigarh stood out as an oasis. Whether due to its status as a Union Territory, or a shared capital and home to the elite of two states, the city was guarded and surveilled with vigilance. For those of us who were young, our angst-ridden teenage existence existed alongside a reality in disarray. I saw my father’s (a government officer) car riddled with bullets after an attempt on his life.

Some of us searched for untroubled worlds and found them in bookstores. In those days, Capital Book Depot, the English Book Shop, and the Asia Book House, were the three stalwart locations of a reader’s existence in Chandigarh. A visit to these bookstores was de rigueur, whether you were a native or a visitor.

It was a limited existence, as before the economic liberalisation of 1991, we did not have access to a range of global books, music, or popular culture. Some books, a few movies, and a motley range of music filtered through to our existence and we devoured them. We read and reread books, borrowed them from each other, and the privileged amongst us, built a library of comics and books.

This is not to say that people do not read anymore, but what it meant for us to have books in a world of bullets. Books allowed us to inhabit a reality that intruded with unvarnished violence in our young lives and to simultaneously escape it. Reading trained the imagination to think beyond the present; not to ignore it or suppress it but to understand that there could be a horizon past what the eye could see.

I walked into Capital Book Depot the other day with my daughter and realised that she was the fourth generation of my family walking into that bookstore. So many moments of our lives, happy and sad, are marked by the books I bought there. I have a distinct memory of arguing with my grandmother about comics, my father letting me buy more than one Asterix when my mother died, the novel I bought for a boy at sixteen, the book of poems he bought when we married, the fiction I read while pregnant with our daughter, the books we bought when she started to read, and our visits now to Capital as a family. For a city often accused of having no lineage, our bookstores have been a repository of our stories.

Harleen Singh, Massachusetts