The legend of a commercial plaza.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

It is a place of crowds and commerce. And now, it is set to get a touch of art.

Last week, Hindustan Times reported on Delhi Development Authority’s intent to redevelop Nehru Place. As part of the project, the area will be given an “artistic upgrade.” Artists have been urged to “submit a plan for incorporating handicraft and hand painting on walls for a general uplifting of the space.“

Here’s a humble suggestion, inspired by the true story of a man. His name won’t be revealed—why will become clearer by the end (though many of us may already know who he is).

Our hero wore crumpled, colourless shirts over crumpled, colourless pants. He had a booming voice, and he would talk about painters and philosophers as passionately as we would talk about film stars. He was Delhi’s most enigmatic bookseller.

He would be seated on a shabby chair in the easternmost plaza of Nehru Place, surrounded by hundreds of second-hand books—and by very many stray dogs, to whom he was far more polite than to his customers. He would nevertheless host daily durbars at his open-air stall, attended by his die-hard devotees: a crew of artists, poets, smokers, and the like. Their gupshup was far too highbrow for us mere mortals. Once, he was overheard saying: “Reading Dostoyevsky is like looking at modern art. His novels are not very straightforward. Freud went into psychoanalysis after reading Dostoyevsky.”

A native of Assam, he had come to Delhi in 1989 “to find out what art was all about.” He ended up selling old books in the district where we used to go for computer hardware and software.

Enconsced amid the book stacks, he would fill the daylight hours by sketching charcoal portraits of passers-by on the title pages of random paperbacks (later, he would throw the books back into the stacks). He sold all kinds of books, but himself was snobbish in his literary taste. He would be very sarcastic whenever a customer picked up, say, a Dan Brown, despite a Kafka lying right next to it. That said, flashes of kindness would have an unsuspecting browser being treated to tea-stall chai, along with monologues on Matisse or Cézanne.

Once, a newspaper journalist wanted to profile him for a weekend feature. He said he wasn’t a “performing monkey.”

Anyhow, he eventually left Nehru Place—as well as his bookselling. That was more than a decade ago. He’s said to have later launched himself as a full-time painter.

Today, Nehru Place has no establishment dedicated to novels, poetry and philosophy. The area’s redevelopment might want to address that absence. At the very least, some wall somewhere should be painted with a likeness of that legendary Nehru Place bookseller, memorialising the unique character briefly lent to the place by that extraordinary citizen.

PS: Photo shows the bookstall, circa 2012