On February 28, Strand Book Stall, Mumbai's iconic bookstore, will down its shutters, marking the end of its 70-year stint.
Two days before it bids goodbye, I approached the store—which was clearing its stock of over 10,000 books through a final clearance sale at 50 per cent—and saw an overwhelming crowd gathered around its precincts and an equally high number of people inside, making it difficult to even walk, leave alone browse through the shelves. It was very rare to see so many people at the bookstore, which, at any given day, barely had three or four enthusiasts dropping by its cosy and intimate confines.
"You never came to me while I was alive, and now as I am about to die, you come to me and ask me to talk," says the managing partner of the store, Vidya Virkar, with a sombre expression on her face, as she refers to a poem sent to her by a friend. "Why now?" she asks me before adding, "Depleting footfalls was the main reason that we decided to shut shop, and as we announce closure, people trample to come to us, so much so that there's hardly any time to breathe, literally.”
As I await my turn to meet Vidya who is cosily ensconced in a chair on the mezzanine floor of her book stall at Mumbai's Fort area, I see that she is engaged in an animated conversation with another woman, presumably in her 50s. After about 20 minutes, the ladies came up to me and ask if I could click a picture for them, to which I readily obliged. Later, Vidya tells me that the woman in question was none other than Maxy Cooper, the daughter of the man who gave Vidya's father and founder of Strand Book Stall, the late T. Shanbagh, his first space at Strand cinema, marking the beginning of the future book business. "I saw her and met her for the first time in my life right now. I didn't even know she existed. She must have come to know that we were shutting down and somehow googled the address and come all this way from her house at Napeansea road.
Somehow, both families have come a full circle. "Strand cinema has shut down; now, Strand bookstall too takes the plunge," she says, her eyes moist.
Shanbagh had set up a kiosk in Strand cinema in 1948 and he kept the name when he moved to a bigger shop which he ran till he passed away in 2009. During this time, Strand emerged as the place where students, scholars, bibliophiles, writers and many well-known political personalities purchased their books. Nehru is supposed to have shopped there, as did Manmohan Singh, who was the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Vikram Sarabhai and many others.
But the decision to call it quits was not a sudden one. Vidya took over the reins of her father's business in the late 90s, as a UK-returned wide-eyed youngster, had earlier shut down six more branches including the ones at Infosys and Wipro campuses and another bookshop at Bengaluru. "We have been going through tremendous losses. People want to shop for books online and it is not possible for a bookshop like ours to survive. In fact, even foreign titles are now just a click away. We aren't as much in demand as we had been, say, during my father's time."
Vidya had first feared for the future of the bookstall when retail chains such as Crossword and Landmark came into play more than a decade back. But she says her father had reassured her saying that "none of them can match us at Strand." But the online revolution hit the nail on its head.
“We tried what we could to keep going, but the landscape has changed now.”
So, we decided that it’s time to let go,” says Vidya, who has been running the business with her brother Arun since Shanbhag’s demise.
News reports of the bookstall's closure, which was first announced through Twitter, are all over the internet and social media. Vidya says she has been flooded with calls from well-wishers, with mixed reactions; some wished her a smooth closure, while others were infuriated at her decision. "A lady came up to me, questioning my audacity to shut shop. She said she had been a regular at our shop and couldn't imagine a time when we were no longer around." Parth Dedhia, a sexagenarian who retired from the army as a doctor, told me that he was baffled at how people were reacting. "Just talking about the 70-year-old bookstore is not enough when one comfortably clicks online to buy books. It is simply fake emotions. If they feel so terribly about it, they should have said it when the book business was declining."
To book lovers, as well as students, Strand was a treasure trove; an eclectic book place where one was bound to find not just bestsellers, but books across genres and sometimes books that were carefully scouted for the discerning reader, which were not available anywhere else. Mayur Davies, a 40-year-old engineer working at Vikhroli, says, "I could always depend on finding my subject specific books here, and also books from Russian literature and translations, which are unavailable elsewhere."
Hrushikesh Sonsurkar, a finance professional working in Mumbai, reminisces how his grandmother used to get him to the Strand book fest at Sunderbhai Hall when he was a teen, to return with bags full of discounted books which he would devour days on end. "Strand Book Stall was a known name, especially in households that valued reading," he tells me.
Vidya agrees and says that her father who had "an incredible choice and an eye for the right book" had deliberately chosen to limit bestseller books to just one shelf so that other books of varied topics and subject areas could be accommodated to assist cross-pollination."We were known to be title-rich, and so we had no problem ordering all kinds of books that were out there. Having been a voracious reader himself, he instinctively knew what kind of book one would love to read. So, in 1948, when he was allotted a space at the cinema, he contacted UK publishers and brought in literature by foreign authors. India was just opening to the world outside at that time. For instance, he bought 1000 copies of Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, explained to everyone who dropped by as to why the book was so important. People started trusting him because he was knowledgeable and honest."
Some of the most distinguished books that Shanbagh curated himself include Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention from Fire to Freud, by Peter Watson, The Art of India by C. Sivaramamurti, and so on.
The seed for the book business was sowed in Shanbagh's mind when, in the pre-independence era, he was once caught browsing through a book in a bookshop and asked to leave.
As I'm about to leave, I'm told that the love that the bookstore received the past few days was indeed the right epitaph for Strand.
I picked up a picture-heavy coffee table book on Mumbai, the city of dreams, as a memento.