Tag: Delhi

A Book about Books that Explores a Serendipitous Space for All Readers

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date September 15, 2026
1 Comment on A Book about Books that Explores a Serendipitous Space for All Readers

A conversation with Kanupriya Dhingra with a brief introduction to her book, The Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, published by Speaking Tiger Books.

“Most Sundays, I found myself walking alongside hundreds of others for whom Daryaganj was, and continues to be, the primary site of book buying. It was democratic, messy, inclusive, sometimes illegal, often chaotic, but always alive.” 

-- Kanupriya Dhingra, Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public

Perhaps, Kanupriya Dhingra’s Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, could be seen as a democratisation of the process of reading. In an ethnographic study of a book bazaar that springs up every Sunday, Dhingra familiarises us with the historicity of the culture of a bazaar, of reading and even locates its roots in the Mughal Faiz Bazaar from the time of Shahjahan (1592-1666).

In an earlier article dated 2020, she had written about the bazaar: “Historian Sohail Hashmi says that Akbarabadi Begum, one of Shahjahan’s wives, built this market in its earliest form. Several historical maps of Delhi show the existence of ‘Faiz Bazaar’ in this area. The name, Daryaganj, itself means ‘a market across a river’, where ‘Darya’ refers to a river (here, the river Yamuna) and ‘Ganj’ refers to a site where trade is conducted. It was not always the same product that was traded here; Daryaganj only became synonymous with the sale of used, rare, pirated books in the 1960s. According to locals, Daryaganj started as a consumer goods market, set up adjacent to the walls between Subhash Park and Kasturba Gandhi Hospital. There were vinyl records and hand-mounted record players, radios, transistors, mechanical goods, medical goods and used clothes; books too found their place. After a few minor relocations not significantly far away from the lanes of Daryaganj, a few booksellers moved to the now absent ‘Lohe ka Pul‘ (Iron Bridge), near Golcha Cinema, from where the street market began to expand. Before its recent relocation to a nearby site by the name of Mahila Haat, the bazaar extended till Delite Cinema Hall. The structure of the market appeared like a long ‘L’, with books stacked on the sidewalks of Netaji Subhash Marg and Asaf Ali Road, and more than 250 vendors.”

Dhingra continued spellbound by the ‘magic’ of this bazaar when she visited it as a child and then, as a university student. Coming from a small town, where bookshops that stocked more than textbooks were a rarity, she supported the booksellers when they protested the ‘legalisation’ and the relocation of the bazaar to a newer site in 2019 and wrote of it in Himal Southasian in an article titled, ‘The death of a book bazaar’.

The book gives fascinating glimpses of booksellers and book buyers, of connoisseurs and of students striving for upward economic mobility in the job market. It houses parents, children, old people and young, book lovers, browsers, students, teachers and more. Dhingra asserts: “A republic, in its original sense, is a res publica—a public thing, a commons, something that belongs to everyone who participates in it. Not owned, not curated, not gatekept. The Patri Kitab Bazaar[1] is exactly this: a space where a rickshaw puller and an IAS officer, a first-generation student and a shauqeen[2] collector, a vendor from Uttar Pradesh and a buyer from Assam all have equal claim to the same pile of books.”

One of the most fascinating stories that emerges is of the Om Bookstore — that can be found in major malls across Delhi and many major cities of India — and Om Books International. Dhingra met the founder Om Mago and this is what she wrote: “Om Mago told me that when he first came to Daryaganj, there was no bazaar to speak of—just a few men who had found this way of living. Books that did not belong anywhere, that had potential afterlives, had been discovered as a sellable commodity. ‘There was need in Delhi, and there were books.’ From that simple equation, he learnt the trade, built connections across Delhi and Mumbai, and gradually transformed a pavement enterprise into what Om Books International is today.”

Dhingra has gathered details from booksellers and connoisseurs. Connoisseurs like Sohail Hashmi and Abdul Sattar gave her historic antecedents while bloggers like, Mayank Austen Soofi, who runs the highly coveted The Delhi Walla blog, and claims to idolise Arundhati Roy and have met her in the bazaar, shared more recent perspectives. Soofi “has been passing in and out of the same neighbourhoods for more than a decade, documenting the minutest social and cultural changes” as the New Yorker noted, giving almost a ‘Proustian quality’ to his posts on Delhi.

Dhingra has noticed that selling books is largely confined to men though women buyers are visible. She sees a difference in approach among the genders, which is an interesting observation, given the fact that Delhi is known for its discriminatory attitude towards women.

What I found most fascinating about the book was the capture of local colours, though the focus was more centred on discussions around North Indian languages. It has interesting snippets like a man who operates pirated books out of the dickey of his car, lodging his ware near an ATM. Dhingra tells us: “At the Patri Kitab Bazaar, pirated books are called D ki kitab—where D refers to duplicate and/or digital.” She mentions too, a publisher that brings out ‘Guru Chela’ ( Master- Disciple) booklets. “There were some 100 colourful booklets with miscellaneous titles of useful literature in Hindi, English, and Hinglish.” These were a mix of write- ups on ‘useful’ tips as well as popular jokes and light literature. Along with these, the vendor sold things like “pocketknives, razors, scissors, tiny notebooks, used fountain pens, old wristwatches and their band.” She also found stalls selling old film posters, lyrics and even ancient coins! A copy of the Lolita (1955, written by Vladimir Nabokov in English) translated to Hindi finds mention. “I found a copy of Lolita in the bazaar once—in Hindi. The title only mentioned Lolita in Hindi, and there was nothing else on the cover except a woman’s portrait. There were no copyright claims inside the paratextual pages—no author, no publisher. For a reader or buyer who is not familiar with Nabokov and his works, it is just another novel in Hindi.”

She makes one feel it’s a must to visit the bazaar, perhaps, with a copy of her book in hand! Her style is smooth, evocative and flows well. Dhingra has a passion which translated to a whole book reflecting a community that is unique in the very fact of its existence, tied loosely by the love of books – not necessarily reading. We interviewed her to discuss her journey and here’s how she responded:

“As an ethnographer of the city streets, I am constantly reminded of the transformative power of walking. It allows us to uncover hidden stories, forge unexpected connections, and shape the world around us.” Can you please elaborate on this “transformative power” and how the bazaar forms and unforms every Sunday?

Until 2019, since the 1970s, Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar was set up between two landmark cinema halls in Old Delhi — Golcha Cinema on Netaji Subhash Road and Delite Cinema on Asaf Ali Road. On any other day, this L-shaped part of the street carried the ordinary rhythms of a working city: government offices, shops and traders, food outlets, traffic on the road. On Sundays, those rhythms would change. Iron and cardboard boxes, tarpaulin sheets, and books spread across the footpath, using the closed shutters of offices as their display backdrop. The bazaar did not occupy the street so much as it temporarily rewrote it. What ethnography taught me to pay attention to is precisely this rewriting of the space that is overdetermined during the week, claimed by traffic and routine and competing uses, is briefly re-scripted by the arrival of booksellers and readers. And then, by evening, unscripted again. Books would go back in their boxes, the tarpaulins were folded, and the footpath was simply itself — flat and indifferent. The street would forget entirely what stood on it. But the people remembered.

Can you tell our readers what is ethnography? Why did you feel the need to do an ethnographic study on the Sunday book bazaar? What would be the target readership of your very well researched book?

Ethnography, at its simplest, is the method of sustained and repeated presence in a place and trying to understand a world on its own terms. What it is not is a survey, an archive search, or a one-time interview. It is slow and embodied. It is, also, deeply dependent on the trust of the people who agree to let you into their working lives.

Because the bazaar exists outside the formal structures that usually produce archives, there are no official records of this market. The only way to know it is to go there, repeatedly, over years, and listen. The book is built from those years of fieldnotes, interviews, and observations. While the formal fieldwork for my doctoral thesis happened in 2019, I had been a regular for a while. I continued spending Sundays at the bazaar across seasons, displacements, and a pandemic. With the support of the booksellers, I documented the 2019 protests in urgent media reports as well, to produce an immediate archive of what happened to the bazaar, instead of waiting to revisit my notes only while writing my thesis.

As for who the book is for — I resisted writing a book that only scholars could read. The Sunday Book Bazaar is for the student who recognises Usha with her handwritten list of textbooks — one that has scope for a few other ‘finds’ because her pocket money allows for it, here, at the bazaar. It is for the shauqeen who recognises their own Sunday morning in these pages. It is for the Delhi reader who has been going to the bazaar for years without quite knowing why. It is for the reader in Singapore, or Mumbai, or London, or Lahore who has their own version of this informal, unruly, necessary space and sees it reflected here. It is a book about books, the people who read them, and the people who make that possible. The research is rigorous, I hope. But the book is for everyone.

You have mentioned the absence of women among the sellers. The few that are there do not even see themselves as sellers but as temporary fixtures in lieu of their husbands. Can you tell us why in the twenty-first century women are still being segregated in the bazaar? Is it justified?

The question of women at the bazaar is more nuanced than it first appears. Women vendors are not absent. Quite a few have been running stalls at Daryaganj for years, some for decades, even if it means supporting their brother or husband or son. What is more important, and what my fieldwork revealed, is that many of them do not claim the identity of bookseller. When I asked directly, the answers were careful, deflective, or simply negative. One vendor, who had been managing her late husband’s stall with evident expertise for decades, told me that this work belongs to men because women cannot “lift heavy books”. Another, who had joined the bazaar more recently, had also lost her husband. She was selling the stock he had gathered over the years, keeping the stall going until her son was old enough to take over. But it was more than that, she said, “He passed away on a Sunday, after selling books at the bazaar. That has to mean something.”

Cities give women this kind of ironic independence. The bazaar is one of its more interesting examples. Anonymity in the crowd, the freedom to occupy public space on their own terms, the economic agency that comes from handling money and stock and customers without anyone particularly watching. And yet the identity, the word bookseller, with its history and its community and its authority, remains something many women at the bazaar do not claim for themselves. The crowd hides them, and that hiding is simultaneously a form of freedom and a form of erasure.

You have also noticed that women buyers are different from men. How and why? Please elaborate. Is this a reflection of the culture/ accepted norm of the city/ the sellers and visitors?

Women’s time in public spaces, especially in Delhi, is measured differently. They negotiate with surveillance and scrutiny. Their purposefulness is driven by necessity. They arrive with clearer lists and are less likely to linger without a specific destination in mind. A woman spending two hours browsing a pavement book market on a Sunday morning is doing something that requires more social permission than the equivalent activity does for a man.

And yet the bazaar’s openness, its visibility from the street, and the absence of walls and thresholds made it more accessible to women than many other public spaces in the city. Even Mahila Haat[3] tends to offer an interior that might feel safer, allowing a new scope for purposeless wandering. Moreover, on a public footpath or inside a gated haat, among other people, that openness is precisely what makes the bazaar feel usable for many women readers. What they do with that openness reflects the social conditions they navigate to get there, not their relationship to books, which is as varied and as shauqeen as anyone else’s.

One of the things that your book makes me wonder is — is book piracy justified? What do you think?

I want to be clear first: I do not support piracy, and it is illegal. That is not a complicated position for me. What is complicated is the context in which piracy at Daryaganj exists and the questions that context raises.

After the March 2026 raid by the Crime Branch in Rohini, in which over twenty thousand books were seized — titles by Arundhati Roy, Yuval Noah Harari, Haruki Murakami, James Clear, among others — Penguin India posted about it on social media. The comments were quite instructive. Readers responded not with sympathy for the publisher but with a straightforward observation: books are not affordable. The original editions of the seized titles cost several hundred rupees each. The pirated edition costs a fraction of that.

I am not using this to justify piracy. I am using it to point to the structural failure that makes piracy legible to so many people as a reasonable response. The formal publishing market has not solved the affordability problem. The bazaar, in its informal and sometimes illegal way, tends to fill that gap, albeit partially. The more interesting question is not whether piracy is right or wrong but what its persistence tells us about the gaps the formal book economy has created and, at the moment, cannot fulfil. A reading public that cannot afford books is not served by enforcement alone.

You have written of “a densely competitive educational ecosystem shaped by chronic state underfunding, unequal infrastructure, and the relentless neoliberal promise of upward mobility through credentialism. In this context, the bazaar does more than sell books: it acts as an unofficial welfare infrastructure, absorbing and responding to gaps produced by shrinking public support and rising private costs.” Please elaborate how the bazaar supports aspirants of upward mobility. Does it help close the gaping gaps we notice among different socio-economic, ethnic groups that exist within the given polity?

The phrase unofficial welfare infrastructure came out of a specific observation: that the buyers I met at Daryaganj were not, in the main, casual browsers. They were people for whom the price of a book at a formal bookshop was a genuine obstacle. Students preparing for competitive examinations. First-generation readers with no family library to draw on. Aspirants using books as tools for a different life.

The state has not solved the problem of access to books. School libraries are underfunded. Public libraries are underused and often inaccessible. The formal book market serves readers who can afford it. The bazaar, entirely without subsidy or policy support, has for six decades been doing what the state has not: putting books within reach of people who need them.

Does it close socio-economic gaps? Partially, and imperfectly. It reduces the cost of access. It creates a space where the student with fifty rupees and the collector with five hundred rupees stand at the same stall. But it does not solve the structural problems that create those gaps — underfunding, unequal infrastructure, the credentialism that makes books feel like necessities rather than pleasures. What it does is something more modest and more important: it refuses to accept that books should only be available to those who can afford them at full price.

What has been your most interesting experience in this bazaar? Please share it with us.

There is one moment I return to often. It was 28 July 2019, a Sunday, a few weeks into my formal fieldwork. I was walking from Delhi Gate Metro Station toward the bazaar, headphones on, no music, mentally preparing for the day’s interviews. My phone rang. It was Qamar Saeed, the vendor I had come to know as the ‘King of Daryaganj’, “Madamji, bazaar uth gaya hai. Aap jaldi aaiye.” Madamji, the bazaar has been lifted. Come quickly.

I walked faster. My mind had gone quiet. No fieldwork instincts, no questions forming. Just the turn onto Netaji Subhash Marg, and then the footpath. It looked the same. That was the first thing I noticed: how completely the same it looked. The shutters were where they always were. The traffic moved. A guard sat outside the closed bank, reading his phone. And then I looked at the footpath, and it was just a footpath. No iron boxes. No tarpaulin sheets. No one crouching. No one haggling. Just concrete, flat and indifferent, as though six decades of a particular kind of Sunday morning had been lifted along with the stalls and taken somewhere I could not see.

I understood something that morning that I had known intellectually but not yet felt, that how fragile and contingent this world was. How much it depended on permissions and invisibilities, on the stubbornness and resilience of people who showed up every Sunday and arranged their books and waited. That day shaped this book more than any other.

Do you think this bazaar will continue to thrive/survive given the online market of books? Please elaborate.

The bazaar has already survived things more threatening than the online market. It has survived displacement orders, pandemic lockdowns, municipal raids, and sixty years of operating without official sanction. The online market is a pressure, but it is not a new kind of pressure.

What the online market cannot replicate is serendipity. You cannot search for a book you do not know exists. You cannot stumble upon a 1978 Penguin edition with someone else’s marginalia on an algorithm. You cannot haggle, or sit on the vendor’s side of the stall and hear a story that changes how you read. The shauqeen will keep coming for precisely these reasons. The students will keep coming because the price point remains unbeatable. The families will keep coming because it is still, on a Sunday morning in Old Delhi, one of the most alive places in the city.

The question is not whether the bazaar will survive but what form it will take. It has always been good at taking new forms — from the footpaths of Jama Masjid to the stretch between Golcha and Delite to Mahila Haat. Each relocation changes something and preserves something. That capacity for reinvention, for showing up in a new place with the same iron boxes and the same stubbornness, is what I mean when I call this a story of resilience. The bazaar has never needed the formal economy’s permission to exist. It is unlikely to start now.

Thank you for your fabulous book and wonderful answers.

[1] The Pavement Book Bazaar

[2] connoisseur

[3] Ironically, translates to ‘Women’s Bazaar’ in Hindi

(This review and online interview by email is by Mitali Chakravarty)

Click here to read an excerpt from Sunday Book Bazaar

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Musings

We Come with Nothing…

By Farouk Gulsara

It was just another meeting to catch up. The topic that cropped up was about downsizing. One of my friends, now in her sixties, realised that her house was filled with too many things. I do not know whether she had just heard about Marie Kondo, but that was what she had been talking about all night.

It all started when she was growing up among the members of the lower heap of the food chain. Her elders told her to value everything in life. She was taught that even a small twig has its use: to pick the teeth. The compulsion to keep and not waste began.

As life improved and she began climbing the food chain, the desire to immortalise memories of the good times trickled in. Buying mementos to mark each life’s milestone became imperative. Over time, the collection became something she would be proud of.

Then the senior years trickled in, and there she was, cooped in an empty nest without her offspring, but a bungalow full of nostalgic memories and mementoes. Caring for these objects of endearment soon became a chore. They meant nothing to others. The question of what would happen to them began to play on her mind. They would become a burden that nobody would want to carry.

Slowly, she started getting rid of her belongings, a figurine here and a saree there, leaving only a bare minimum for sustenance. In the name of philanthropy, she gave some of her belongings to the needy. To her loved ones, she gave them in the name of family heirlooms. The question is whether the others showed equal enthusiasm for owning them.

Her case also reminded me of another elderly couple who would proudly show off all their awards and a precious collection of items from around the world, as they had been stationed in various parts of the world under the umbrella of the Commonwealth. Every nook of their living room held a story from their many years of wedded bliss; a token from Somalia, a gift from Delhi, a piece from Borneo, and so on.

The next time I saw her, she was a widowed wife of 80-plus with the memory of a 60+ years of married life and a house-load full of, by that time, what she viewed as a load of junk. The mementoes were just too difficult to keep up with, and she had forgotten why and where she and her husband got them in the first place. She too was trying to dispose of them with the help of her daughter through a jumble sale, who was more than glad to do it in the hope of getting more living space.

Then there was another recent situation that set me off into overdrive. One of my old friends passed away suddenly. Lying in a coffin in a complete state of bliss, my friend was without a care in the world. Outside his house compound were his three prized superbikes, which attracted more attention than the rest of his family members. Now they stood unwanted. My friend’s wife could not wait to dispose of them to the first bidder. At least my friend, being a Chinese person, would have an effigy of a motorbike made, or even a sample of his previous VW Beetle collection, for the last journey before he was cremated.

Now, after watching the latest Hollywood interpretation of Homer’s epic poem Odyssey and reaching out to educate myself on Iliad and the lessons from them, one thing is clear. The purpose of these poems is not merely to showcase the valiant battles that the great warriors of the Greek generals won nor are they about the trophies and spoils they took back or the fantastical journeys they sailed. It is all about the experience and emotion associated with those moments. The warriors live on in the memory of their feats, nothing more. Everything else decays; so do relationships. The only remaining proof of their existence, it seems, is memory and the intergenerational recital of the epics through oral traditions.

So, for us in the 21st century, we do not have to compose poems to remember our lives by. We have the luxury of being able to store them in the clouds, guarded by angels, and probably will meet the same end after our demise. This seems more prudent than cluttering our borrowed spaces with an unnecessary carbon footprint that could burden future generations and be labelled as hoarding.

Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems

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Tags Borneo, Commonwealth, Delhi, Farouk Gulsara, Greek, Hollywood, Homer, Illiad, Odyssey, Rifle Range Boy, Somalia

Excerpt

When the Road Becomes the Teacher

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date September 15, 2026
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Title: When the Road Becomes the Teacher

Author: Shubha Apte

Chapter 4

THE FIRST FLIGHT — LESSONS FROM SINGAPORE

“A journey is not so much a place, but a new way of seeing.” — Pico Iyer

Travel has always been my passion. From childhood, the love for exploring new places was instilled in me by my parents. They believed travel was not just recreation, but education.

Every school vacation, my father would plan a month-long trip, taking us across cities, temples, forests, and historic landmarks.

By the time I stepped into adulthood, the entire stretch of Gujarat and Saurashtra was familiar terrain — Dwarka, Porbandar, Jamnagar, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Surat, Rajkot.

We traveled across the country too, exploring Calcutta in the east and venturing north to Kashmir, Amritsar, Agra, Delhi and Jaipur, Jodhpur and Jaisalmer in the Northwestern part.

Along the way, each place offered its own unforgettable charm — the serenity of the Golden Temple, the fragrant rose gardens of Jodhpur, the majestic palaces of Jaipur, the golden deserts of Jaisalmer, and the shimmering beauty of Dal Lake in Srinagar.

Each journey painted my childhood with stories, sights, and memories that would stay with me forever.

Perhaps that is why, when I was finally given the opportunity to travel abroad on a business trip to Singapore, my excitement was indescribable.

But beneath that excitement was a quiet nervousness — it was my first international trip, a solo journey, and I had to navigate visas, documentation, and the unfamiliarity of foreign travel.

I still remember the night before my flight — the quiet hum of anticipation, the open suitcase neatly arranged with formal wear and presentation notes, and the flutter in my heart that felt both brave and uncertain. This wasn’t just another professional assignment — it felt like a rite of passage.

Singapore was my first glimpse of a world beyond India — an island nation I had only encountered in business magazines and travel columns.

As the aircraft lifted off the runway, I felt something shift inside me. Beneath the official purpose of the trip lay something more personal: the realization that I was crossing a threshold that would reshape the way I saw work, people, and myself.

The first few days were busy with meetings and deliverables, yet my Singapore-based colleagues made sure I didn’t miss the beauty of their city.

Over weekends, they took me to Gardens by the Bay, Sentosa Island, Universal Studios, Little India, and shopping districts filled with light and energy. Their warmth made the newness less intimidating.

I experienced my first metro journey abroad — taking the MRT from Ang Mo Kio to Raffles Place — and was amazed at the punctuality, efficiency, and discipline that seemed to pulse through the city’s transport system.

Gardens by the Bay left me mesmerized; Sentosa offered calm and peace, while Universal Studios was a burst of color, joy, and laughter.

Singapore’s friendliness, cleanliness, and multicultural harmony made a deep impression on me.

It was a place where professionalism coexisted effortlessly with warmth, where discipline didn’t suppress diversity but strengthened it.

When I returned home, friends and colleagues asked about the presentations, the meetings, and the outcomes.

But what stayed with me long after the trip was not just the work accomplished — it was the inner shift.

Singapore taught me that stepping outside our comfort zone widens our world in ways we never expect.

That first flight did more than carry me across countries — it carried me into a broader way of thinking, observing, and belonging.

It showed me that growth often begins at the edge of comfort, and that the world is much larger and more welcoming than our fears allow us to believe.

“Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” — Miriam Beard

What Singapore Taught Me

Every first step into the unknown teaches us something essential about ourselves.

Singapore showed me that courage doesn’t always roar; often, it’s the quiet decision to board a plane alone and trust that you will find your way.

In every MRT ride, every unfamiliar street, and every new conversation, I discovered the subtle power of openness — the willingness to learn, adapt, and embrace difference.

When we travel with curiosity instead of fear, the world responds with generosity.

And sometimes, one journey becomes the beginning of a much larger unfolding — a reminder that confidence grows one step, one city, and one experience at a time.

Reflection: The First Flight Within

We often believe that courage lies in grand actions — but sometimes, it lies in handing your passport to an immigration officer with shaky hands.

My first flight taught me that courage is a journey too.

That every time we step out into the unknown, we return home a little braver.

A little wiser.

A little more ourselves.

About the Book:

When the Road Becomes the Teacher: A Reflective Memoir of Wisdom Gained Around the World is a memoir about how travel can transform the way we see the world and ourselves. Drawing on four decades of journeys across India and beyond, Shubha Apte reflects on the experiences, encounters, cultures, and unexpected moments that shaped her understanding of resilience, confidence, leadership, cultural intelligence, and personal growth.
From her first international business trip to Singapore to later journeys across Japan, Norway, Malaysia, Europe, and the United States, each destination became more than a place to visit—it became an opportunity to learn.
Part travel memoir and part reflection on personal transformation, the book invites readers to look beyond destinations and discover the lessons that every journey can offer.

About the Author:

Shubha Apte is an author, executive coach, and leadership consultant with over 35 years of corporate experience. She is the author of multiple books including the Amazon Bestseller, When the Road Becomes the Teacher. Her writing blends real-life insight with storytelling, exploring themes of resilience, purpose and human connections.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Poetry

Freedom to Dream

By Pramod Rastogi

FREEDOM TO DREAM

Dreams I see are seamless and clear.
Yet, when I try to recollect them,
They appear blurred and distorted,
Their threads so loosely woven
That the essence slips through the gaps,
Leaving little behind for the dreamer
To gather into a garland
And give his visions a narrative.

Most of the dreams I see are fleeting.
They seem to leave no trace upon my mind.
I can scarcely recall them later.
Yet, when I reflect upon the freedom
Life bestows upon us,
I find, in whatever wisdom I possess,
That it is the freedom to dream
Which surpasses all others.

Its untouchable nature makes us free
To dream without restraint.
A freedom fighter, condemned
To mount the gallows at dawn,
Can still dream of liberty
For his country until his final hurrah.
The noose settles slowly around him,
And he drifts into his last sleep.

Yet his dream endures.
Martyrdom still shines within it,
And though his eyes are open no more,
A smile lingers in their memory.

Pramod Rastogi is an Emeritus Professor at the EPFL, Switzerland. He is a poet, academician, researcher, author of nine scientific books, and a former Editor-in-chief (1999-2019) of the international scientific journal, Optics and Lasers in Engineering. He was an honorary Professor at the IIT Delhi between 2000 and 2004. He was a guest Professor at the IIT Gandhinagar between 2019 and 2023. He is presently an honorary adjunct Professor at the IIT Jammu.

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Tags Delhi, EPFL, Gandhinagar, IID, Jammu, Pramod Rastogi, Switzerland

Conversation

Overland to India with an American Hippie Named Ed: An Interview with Lily West

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date July 14, 2026
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By Suzanne Kamata

In Lily West’s travel memoir West goes East she recounts venturing from her native England overland toward India in the early 1970s with an impulsive American named Ed, a pro-Palestine fellow hippie whom she meets en route, on a shoestring budget. With the brazenness that comes with youth, they become entwined with all sorts of shady characters, finding themselves the guest of a charming conman in Amman, and being mistakenly deposited in a brothel in Cairo. Among other adventures, they rescue a polar bear from heat stroke in a zoo in Khartoum, are arrested twice in Egypt (and not for climbing to the top of a pyramid, which they do), and find themselves spectators at a public hanging in Iraq.

Many of the places they visited, such as the West Bank, Sudan and Afghanistan, are even less accessible now. West, by the way, is one of the few people who have traveled to every country on earth recognised by the UN. Although she made these travels as a man, she now lives in Japan as a woman. This award-winning book is a wild ride into the treacherous terrain of a bygone era. Lily generously agreed to answer a few questions.

Suzanne Kamata: First of all, congratulations on launching this book into the world! It has had a very positive reception, including an award for NomadMania Best Travel Book 2024. In the introduction you write that you hadn’t intended to write a book about traveling with your friend Ed, and that the idea came to you decades later. Can you tell us about the writing process? Also, how did you manage to recreate the scenes so vividly?

Lily West: I had often been urged to write a book, but never found the time or energy to do so. Then a friend introduced me to a publishing agent from English Agency Japan, who on hearing some of my travel stories, begged me to write a sample chapter which I eventually did. Then he demanded another and another until somehow after a year the book was finished. I guess the scenes in “West goes East” had remained vivid in my memory, because I had had some fifty years to remember them.

SK: Could you tell us a bit about the road to publication?

LW: The road to actual publication was a long one. My agent took six years only to come up with two concrete offers from publishers. Lots of offers that turned out to be pie in the sky though! I rejected both, the one because they wanted to edit the book down to half its size, the other because they wanted the chapter about Israel and all mention of Palestine removed. No! So, the manuscript continued to sit in my computer. Then Harry Mitsidis, the founder of the NomadMania extreme travel group, and arguably the world’s most travelled man, came over to Japan to verify that I really had been to the 193 UN member countries and thus was qualified to join the group. He was amazed that I was so easy to verify. Luckily, I had sent a postcard to my parents from every country I had been to. And my parents had kept them all! So, we became friends; I mentioned to him that I had written a book, and he asked me to send him a couple of chapters. He was so impressed that he said he would write a foreword and get the book published on Amazon. (This was technically beyond my ability!)

But he made it a condition that I include an epilogue about Lily’s much harder and longer journey, the journey to be accepted as the woman I knew I was. To be honest, I wasn’t very keen on this, because nowhere in the travel book do I mention or hint that I am a “transgender” woman. In fact, in 1972, the year the events in the book happened, it was still my Big Secret, something which could never be divulged to anyone, so I can understand its absence. However, as requested, I wrote the epilogue, which I have heard has caused some readers to cry. Naturally, Harry also wanted Lily West to be credited on the cover as the author, which was fair, because Lily had written the book!

SK: What was the first foreign country you ever visited? What activated your wanderlust?

LW: Well, I was brought up in England, but my mother was German, so we went there most summers. But I think you mean the first country visited by myself. I’ll give you two. I HATED the cruelty of school so much that at 17, I ran away and hitchhiked to Madrid which improved my Spanish enormously. Then that summer the local Education Committee paid for me to spend three months in the Soviet Union studying Russian.
My German grandfather collected stamps, interesting enough, but what fascinated me were the names of the countries. Not just looking at the exotic names, I knew I wanted to go and actually see them! So, after I graduated, I said goodbye to England and set off on my second overland trip to India, as described in West goes East, but this time with no intention of returning.

SK: Early on in the book it becomes clear that Ed has the potential to get into trouble. You write that you were unlikely traveling companions, with very different personalities, and yet you stuck together. Was there any point in your travels that you at least considered going your own way?

LW: Yes, in Baghdad over the Donkey Boy incident! I was so angry with him! But we had gone through so much together that it would have been difficult to split up. Of course, I knew we would part in Delhi, and I would be going off on my own, which eventually landed me in Japan. (After I had been there just under a year, Ed arrived with his wife and son.)

SK: What does it mean to you to be a UN master (one who has visited all 193 countries recognised by the United Nations)?

LW: The end of one lifelong journey! This April, I took part in the largest gathering of UN Masters ever. 64 of us in Azerbaijan! Some had taken considerably less time than the 49 years I had taken, but Harry Mitsidis explained that many more people had been in space or climbed Everest than had visited every country in the world, so we had achieved something very special. Now I do appreciate meeting people from every country and know I can chat about their homeland. 2016 was a significant year for me, as that was when I finally visited No.193, Equatorial Guinea. I was very happy that I had managed this, but to put things into context, something more meaningful for me happened two months later when I was invited to join a 500-strong group of foreign women in Japan. Actually, that was more important for me!

SK: You’ve visited every country in the world recognised by the United Nations, but some have changed greatly since you first visited them. Are there any such countries that you would like to return to? And why/why not?

LW: There are some countries I don’t want to return to, because war has changed them almost irreparably. It would be too sad to see Syria, Iraq, Palestine, or Afghanistan. Or for that matter my two visits to Israel sufficed for me to see what this country was like. Whereas others such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Uzbekistan or Peru have become too touristed and I would rather remember them as they were. I visited Africa 30 times, but on my final visit in 2017, I survived a bad car accident in the Comoro Islands, in which my head broke the windscreen. Surely the Gods were telling me that’s enough!

SK: What is Ed up to now? Has he read the book? If so, what was his response?

LW: Sorry to say that Ed passed away suddenly in 2022. Yes, he had read the book at the insistence of my agent. I knew he would not be happy, even though his full name and where he came from are never mentioned. He wanted all reference and memories of his hippie past erased. For instance, he destroyed all the photos he had taken as well as his diaries. He never told his wife about my book; in fact, she only learned of it from me after his death. She bought the book, read it and then paid me the biggest compliment anyone ever has regarding West goes East: “Thank you so much, Lily. You brought Ed back to life!”

SK: You mention in your epilogue that female Japanese students responded to you differently as a woman; “less daunting,” you wrote. Have you noticed any difference in how you are treated when traveling as a woman versus traveling as a man?

LW: Yes and no. Generally, I find people, especially women, are kinder and more friendly to Lily. Of course, it’s always easier to talk to someone of your own gender. Also, I’m more outgoing and confident in myself as a fellow woman in the company of other women.

But like any other woman, I find myself much more on my guard, while not being paranoid about men, just more watchful in their presence. Luckily, Japan is safer for women than let’s say the UK or the US, but as a woman, I can’t take that personal safety for granted as I would if I were a man.

SK: I realise that this is a book about your travels with Ed, but you drop tantalizing hints about other episodes in your travels. For example, in the epilogue, you write that you and your Japanese partner were taken hostage on a trip to the Central African Republic. What???? Could you share a bit about that?

LW: Very long story from 1996. Fifteen of us were on an overland truck going from East Africa to West Africa. We had budgeted 10 days to go through Congo, but the “roads” were that awful, little but bog holes and mud, that it took us 56 days. During which time three passengers died: snakebite, malaria and cut to pieces by our own tyre chains. However, we felt lucky it had not been more!

Within two weeks, there were no more shops and as cook, I had to go into the villages and exchange stuff for food. Luckily, I found they wanted empty bottles in which to store the poison they used for hunting. I was the cook, but I wouldn’t use meat because I am a vegetarian. One evening, the two Australians who did most of the digging came back from a village with some meat, which they barbecued. A couple of days later, we ran into the first Westerner we had seen, a Belgian in the lumber business. He invited us to eat with him. One of the Australians started to tell him about the meat they had had. The Belgian asked where the village was, then he raised his and asked “Did it have fur?” No. “Did it have a hoof?” No. “I think you ate a baby!” One Australian just vomited, but the other said: “Tasted OK!”

And so, in such a dilapidated state, we finally reached the ferry over the Congo River to Bangui in the Central African Republic. By this time, we were down to 9 or 10 functioning members, for this didn’t really include a French Canadian, our only native French speaker. But he had lost his mind, and would never speak to anyone again during the rest of the trip. So that left me as the only actual French speaker. Anyway, we were at last on the ferry, chattering away about which hotel in Bangui we were going to stay in and really excited about having a shower as opposed to bathing in rivers with crocodiles and snakes.

We parked our truck on some waste ground by the river and I went exploring. The town of Bangui seemed eerily quiet as I found my way to the Novotel. Entering the hotel, I knew all was far from well when I saw a cloud of flies buzzing around the dead man at the check-in desk. Back at the truck, I told the others about the hotel and that we had better leave Bangui first thing in the morning. Everyone agreed, but at about 4 o’clock in the morning, soldiers arrived and started to knock down our tents and force us on to our truck. Those who argued or were too slow were jabbed with their rifles.

So off we went with two armed soldiers on the truck to guard us, but where were they taking us? Back to Congo or somewhere to shoot us?

We hastily formed an escape plan. At a given signal, the two hefty Australian diggers knocked the soldiers to the floor and stood on their guns, while the driver drove like mad overtaking the accompanying jeeps. I had found where the US Embassy was and it was there we headed. All other embassies were closed. We had one American in our group, so we figured that was our best chance. At five o’clock in the morning, our English driver smashed into the gates of the US Embassy at full speed. But the gates were so sturdily made that they did not give way!

In the shock, the soldiers recovered their guns and were screaming “Tirez-le!”, (Shoot him!). The driver got out of his cab window, flung himself into the embassy grounds and hid behind a wall. The soldiers opened fire and lights came on the embassy. They forced the co-driver to turn round and we were taken to a large building where we were all herded into an underground cell at gunpoint. To make matters worse, we could hear the screams of someone being tortured.

At noon, our driver arrived accompanied by personnel from the US Embassy and the Central African Republic Army as well as government officials. Slowly I pieced things together.

The soldiers who had captured us had taken part in a failed coup d’etat and now needed us as human shields to get past the checkpoints and out of Bangui. A deal was struck. They would take us 700km to the Cameroon border where they would set us free. Everyone shook hands and we set off. It took several days to drive, for we had to stop along the way many times as the soldiers constantly tried to intimidate us. Once they lined us up firing-squad style, but shot over our heads. Their idea of a joke, I guess.

However, after 500km, we reached the town of Bouar, which was rebel-held territory, so they felt safe and saw no reason to release us. They kept us in the camp, under guard with no indication as to what might be our fate. After ten days or so, I determined to try to find a way to get out of this camp. Most of the others seemed to sunk into despondency or were just too sick to move.

There were 30 soldiers holding us and I tried reaching out to those who seemed a bit more friendly. I persuaded two of them that we were running out of food, so they took me into the market. The next day, I asked them to take me in again, this time with Takako, my partner. Then while they were drinking beer in a bar, she and I ran for it to another bar which I had spotted the day before.

Were there any foreigners in Bouar, I asked. Yes, there were two and someone offered to take us to their house. The two foreigners turned out to be French Jehovah’s Witness missionaries! By this time, I would have joined! And as I hoped, they had a radio. It was hidden under the floorboards and they let me use it to contact the US Embassy. “You still there”, was the surprised response. “We’ll get you out in the morning,” they promised.

Very early in the morning, a helicopter landed and after more bargaining, the rebels finally let us drive to the Cameroon border. We crossed the border and those of us who could still walk were in the very first bar on the Cameroon side celebrating. Suddenly, in walked the rebel soldiers still with their guns! Oh, no, surely not, I almost exclaimed! Then, the two I had befriended came up to me and asked me to translate. “Don’t worry! We’re so glad we didn’t have to shoot you and would like to buy a beer for you all.” I answered: “We’re also very glad you didn’t shoot us!” To general laughter, everyone raised their beer bottles: “Salut!”

Three days later we arrived in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon. With our driver, I went to the British Embassy to report the three deaths, all Commonwealth citizens. The Ambassador listened as we told our story.

Then he stood up and shook our hands: “Jolly good show, chaps! Let me get you a drink!” The brandy was welcome.

Takako and I were able to contact our families for the first time and reassure them that we were not dead as they feared. We flew to Europe from Cameroon and then on to Japan, arriving three months late. Astonishingly, I was able to keep my job. While I know I went to Africa for adventure, sometimes you can get more adventure than you bargained for!

SK: Wow! What a harrowing experience! Thanks for sharing that! Are there any other travel memoirs or travel writers that you admire and would recommend?

LW: The Roads To Sata by Alan Booth, In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin, An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie.

SK: What’s next? Will there be another book?

LW: I could write another book, yes, but I doubt that I am able to write another book that would be as good as this one. I feel that this is my masterpiece. Every time I look through it, I think, wow, I wrote this! Many travel books nowadays have the author writing about doing many different trips over the years, one chapter per country. I certainly could do one of those too, but I, and others, think that a major strength of West goes East is that it is a story of one continuous journey rather than many short ones. It describes eight months of travelling overland from Syria to India via Afghanistan in 1972, in a world that no sadly longer exists and the people we met along the way, both locals from those countries and other Westerners.

SK: Thank you so much! I, for one, am glad you got this book out into the world.

Lily West and her Japanese students. Photo provided by Suzanne Kamata.

Suzanne Kamata was born and raised in Grand Haven, Michigan. She now lives in Japan with her husband and two children. Her short stories, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in over 100 publications. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, and received a Special Mention in 2006. She is also a two-time winner of the All Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest, winner of the Paris Book Festival, and winner of a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award.

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Excerpt

The Sunday Book Bazaar at Daryaganj

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date July 14, 2026
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Title: The Sunday Book Bazaar: Daryaganj and the Making of a Reading Public in Delhi

Author: Kanupriya Dhingra

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

PROLOGUE

“Faiz Nahar Jaari Hai”

It is six in the morning in Old Delhi. A footpath that bends into an L has already begun its weekly transformation. A bazaar assembles near Delhi Gate, out of almost nothing. Cardboard and iron boxes arrive—carried, wheeled, hauled from nearby godowns in auto-rickshaws—and are set down along the footpath with the precision of long habit. Tambu and tarred canvas sheets follow, spread across the designated six-by-four-foot patches of ground that each seller has claimed, in practice if not always in law, over years and sometimes decades of Sunday repetition. Books emerge: stacked, sorted, and arranged by some private logic visible only to those who have done this a thousand times before. By the time the first chai of the morning arrives at the stall, carried in a small paper cup from the nearby chai-wallah, the bazaar has already begun to announce itself. By nine, it is a different place entirely.

This is Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar: a bazaar of books, and only books. And this—this weekly conjuring, this seemingly serendipitous Sunday ritual—is what this book is about.

Every Sunday morning, the same stretch of pavement sheds its weekday skin. By mid-morning, the pavement fills entirely. Pedestrians who had no intention of stopping find themselves stopped by a spine, a title, a cover half-remembered from childhood. A student crouches over a pile of guidebooks, cross-checking prices on her phone. Two men argue cheerfully over a pulp fiction title. A child drags her father toward a stack of comics. The sellers watch patiently. They know that browsing is not wasting time. It is, in fact, the whole point.

What makes this bazaar remarkable is not only what it sells but what it refuses to be. It has no fixed address in the way a bookshop does, no permanent threshold, no air-conditioning, no MRP sticker that goes unchallenged. Every week, it must be built from scratch, for the crowd that somehow always finds its way back. There is nothing accidental about this. Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar has survived municipal raids, court orders, evictions, relocations, and sixty years of official indifference. It has outlasted the shops behind it, the cinema halls that frame it, and every prediction of its disappearance. It keeps returning, as things in Delhi tend to do, in a slightly different form but with the same insistence.

In the mid-fourteenth century, sixteen years before he became the Sultan of Delhi, Firoz Shah Tughlaq undertook a grand endeavour: the construction of the Faiz Nahar, a seventy-five-mile canal created with the noble intention of bringing welfare to the people. Over time, the canal evolved under the watchful eye of Shah Jahan, stretching further and transforming the landscape around it. Its banks were adorned with lush neem and peepul trees; its waters flowed through the heart of Chandni Chowk, with one branch entering the majestic Red Fort as part of the Nahar-e-Bahisht. The other arm, known as Nahar Saadat Khan, meandered through the bustling streets of Daryaganj before merging with Jamuna, the river Yamuna. Along this vibrant waterway, a lively array of shops flourished, from jewellers and fruit sellers to sweet makers and fabric merchants, creating a corridor of commerce and conversation.

With time, however, the canal fell into disrepair. Hope was rekindled in 1820, when Sir David Ochterlony initiated its restoration. Poet Shah Nasir immortalised the event in verse, celebrating Ochterlony—affectionately referred to as ‘Looni Akhtar’—and the canal’s revival. For the people of Delhi, the return of the Faiz Nahar was more than an engineering triumph; it restored an old rhythm, reaffirming the city’s enduring bond with its waterways.

In the enchanting tales of Sangin Beg’s Sair-ul-Manazil, we encounter vivid scenes of Shahjahanabad and its many moods. His walks lead him to the joyous sight of the Faiz Nahar, inspiring the delightful refrain, ‘Faiz nahar jaari hai’. Faiz canal persists.

Centuries later, in modern Delhi, the spirit of the Faiz Nahar continues—not through water, but through the steady, determined passage of books that animates the streets of Daryaganj every Sunday.

Delhi endures by outgrowing versions of itself. What disappears returns in altered form, what is uprooted finds another ground, and what seems final rarely is. Here, destruction is never quite the end, and reconstruction never a clean beginning. In this ongoing conversation between erasure and perseverance, Old Delhi’s Sunday Book Bazaar has carved out its own fragile space. Its history is folded into the city’s larger habit of rebuilding what has been displaced. Daryaganj Sunday Book Market is not an exception to Delhi’s rhythms but a continuation of them—a marketplace that survives by starting over every Sunday.

My own journey into this parallel world began out of necessity and slowly transformed into something else entirely. I arrived as a researcher and became an accidental shauqeen buyer, lingering over pavement piles, returning week after week, slowly forming bonds with sellers who had long mastered the art of reading their readers. Through these chaotic streets and animated exchanges, I discovered the heart of Delhi’s readership. In their company, I began to understand how this city continues to breathe through its stories, how the joy of encountering books persists, even in the most uncertain times.

Faiz Nahar is gone. But every Sunday in Daryaganj, something of it still persists.

Extracted from The Sunday Book Bazaar: Daryaganj and the Making of a Reading Public in Delhi by Kanupriya Dhingra. Published by Speaking Tiger Books.

About the Book

Every Sunday, in the heart of Old Delhi, a footpath became a bookshop.

For decades, the Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar drew students, collectors, families, tourists and lifelong shauqeen to its pavement piles: textbooks, comics, rare editions, pirated bestsellers, forgotten magazines, discarded libraries, and books that seemed to find their readers by accident. Built by migrant booksellers, sustained by bargain-hunters and bibliophiles, and shaped by the rhythms of the street, the bazaar became one of Delhi’s most beloved cultural institutions.

In The Sunday Book Bazaar, Kanupriya Dhingra traces the life of this remarkable market—from its roots in the book cultures of Shahjahanabad and Daryaganj to its rise as a second-hand book paradise, and from its legal battles and evictions to its relocation in Mahila Haat.

Combining urban history, fieldwork, memoir and literary affection, she follows the books, booksellers and readers who made the bazaar a parallel world of print: informal, unpredictable, deeply democratic, and impossible to replace.

At once urban history, ethnography, memoir, and a love letter to second-hand books, The Sunday Book Bazaar asks what makes a market more than a place of commerce. Who gets to read? Who gets to sell? Who gets to occupy public space? And what does a city lose when it tidies away the unruly, democratic spaces where its readers first learn to browse, bargain, linger and belong?

About the Author

Dr Kanupriya Dhingra researches book history, print cultures, oral history, and urban studies, with a special focus on Delhi’s parallel book markets. Her doctoral work at SOAS, University of London, supported by the Felix Scholarship and the SOAS Fieldwork Grant, examined Daryaganj’s book culture through extensive interviews with booksellers and readers. She has written for Comparative Critical Studies, The Caravan, Seminar, Scroll, and Himal SouthAsian, and has spoken at institutions including Oxford, the British Library, Jadavpur University, Jamia Millia Islamia, and the University of Delhi. She also writes and translates poetry and fiction from Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu.

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Review

A Fire over Mount Everest

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date July 14, 2026
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Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: A Fire over Mount Everest

Author: Siddharth Kak

Publisher: Penguin Random House India


“I had given into a whim. It was not even a career move. Just the indulgence of a fantasy – to make a film on the highest mountain on earth.” 
                                                                                                       -- Siddharth Kak

Books on mountaineering, especially those narrating the climb to Mount Everest from various perspectives, are quite popular till date because though there have been more than fifteen hundred ascents, the aura of climbing and narrating the conquest of the highest peak in the world remains equally exciting even today. Even after so many deaths, Everest’s lure is eternal. India’s 1984 Expedition to Mount Everest, organised by the Indian Mountaineering Foundation (IMF), that succeeded in placing Bachendri Pal, the first Indian woman and the fifth in the world, and four others, on the summit had noted filmmaker and television presenter, Siddharth Kak, and his crew of four cameramen follow this expedition from day one and record each moment of loss and triumph, instances of glory and distress. Though the expedition was romanticised in the world press as a story of bravery, teamwork and human triumph over nature, the entire narrative is told from a different point of view by Siddharth Kak. The spectacular achievement of that May 1984 is etched in history in glorious terms but it does not tell the behind-the-scenes stories of this expedition. This is where this book under review is particularly appealing.

Kak begins by telling us how he got involved in this project in the first place. A small news item in the newspaper in the summer of 1983 announced that after nineteen long years, a national expedition to Mount Everest, featuring seven women, was to be launched by the IMF the following year. Instantly Kak thought it would be a really cool and exciting adventure to capture in a documentary film. He approached Mr. H. C. Sarin under whose aegis the expedition was taking place, earnestly promising him that they would create a gripping script with human emotions and begin filming immediately with the expedition members and the selected girls all over India with their dreams and expectations even before the expedition started and then later match them with what actually happened. When they were confirmed as the official film crew for that particular Everest expedition in 1984, Kak was convinced that he didn’t need to be a mountaineer to make a mountain film.

The narrative then elaborates on how the people who would climb Mount Everest turned out to be very different from any he had ever met before. It was a largely Army team he met at the Delhi Cantonment. The team members included Col. Darshan Khullar, the 23-year -old former national judo champion, Sharavati Prabhu, Lt Col Premchand, Sonam Paljor of the ITBF, Naib Subedar N.D.Sherpa and a few others like Magan Bissa of Rajasthan and Flt Lt T. Sridharan. In those days, each expedition had to open its own route and ensure the safety of its own members. His four-member film team consisted of Deepak Haldankar, who was an ace cameraman in Films Division Delhi, Sanjeev Saith, a skilled mountaineer and still photographer, K. Nandakumar, the sound recordist, and Kak himself. They reached Kathmandu in an Army AN10 aircraft on 7 March 1984. From there they started their trek towards Lukla and several moments of rural celebration were etched in his heart as part of the romanticism of mountain life.

Kak describes in detail their next great filming adventure – a flight over Everest in an unpressurised cabin of a Pilatus Porter aircraft with the pilot Emil Wick while the cockpit door was kept open to capture the mountains in all their majesty. They had to even use chewing gum ingeniously to stick torn pieces of film together that had snapped at such high altitude.

The details of their experiences cannot be narrated within the brief purview of this review, but their stay at the Everest Base Camp, which was their home away from home for nearly two months, provided the most diverse and exciting mixed expedition that India had ever sent to Nepal and Everest. They discovered new aspects of life at high altitudes. Among the women were Bachendri Pal, Rekha P, Chandraprabha Aitwal and Sharavati Prabhu. All of them were equally competent, ‘an irresistible combination for the outside world’, but soon we get to know how they became victims of jealousies and whims of the very strict patriarchal team leaders, who acted according to an inherent army attitude of looking down upon these fellow women climbers. As Kak rightly states, they believed the mountains taught them camaraderie, but in the higher reaches, it was each man for himself.

We are then told of how Col Khullar’s ‘official’ decision about the composition of the three summit parties left women like Chandraprabha Aitwal, Rita Gombu and Rekha Sharma out without even consulting them and how ultimately Bachendri Pal successfully ascended the Everest Summit on 23 May 1984. Kak in his narrative therefore deals with the problems of male-centric mountaineering.
A Fire on Mount Everest springs from an understanding of an incredible moment etched in the memory of the author―a moment very few live to talk about. This is how Kak describes the experience of catching the incredible picture of the first sunrays that fell on the summit of the mountain:

“To an amateur like me, it seemed as if a gigantic fire was raging over Everest. Its majestic glow dwarfed the amphitheatre of the still dark 8000 metre peak around it, Lhotse and Nuptse, huddled in obeisance. It seemed as if Everest was carrying a heavenly torch lit by the gods themselves to symbolize the acme of achievement.

“I was stunned by this celestial display of nature’s savage beauty. I realized that we had been favoured by unseen mystical powers to see what the world had never seen before, a vision of Everest on fire, with towering flames that flew upwards to the heavens.”

After the disaster of the camera films being lost or destroyed, the scene only remains immortal in his memory. The fifty-two coloured as well as black-and-white pictures along with a hand-drawn map of the standard SE route up to Mount Everest that are included in the book add to the reader’s interest as visuals can communicate much better than written words.

The second half of the book appears to be even more interesting because what the author does is to try and locate each individual participant of that 1984 expedition and find out their present status, especially after the passage of forty long years. In the meantime, eight lonely deaths awaited some of the male members of the Everest 84 team. They included Sherpa Ang Dorjee, Major Kiran Inder Kumar, Major Jai Bahuguna, Phu Dorjee, Lopsang Tshering, N.D. Sherpa, the expedition doctor, Dr. Minoo Mehta, and the Deputy Leader of their expedition, Lt Col Premchand. Except for the male mountaineers who had passed on, the others, especially the women, were constantly evolving and adapting.

Kak clearly tells us how the world of mountaineering is not woman-friendly. Women themselves are both victims and perpetrators of a system that condemns them to second-class citizenship in the mountaineering hierarchy, as indeed in most of their lives. After taking a lot of trouble in locating the erstwhile women members of the team today who are located in different corners of the world, Kak realised how for a woman in India, it is difficult to combine an independent career with marriage and domesticity. With the exceptions of Sharavati Prabhu and Rita Gombu, the rest of the women members have carried on their mountaineering ambitions as single women. Certainly, for active mountaineers, like Chandraprabha P and Bachendri Pal, mountaineering began as a liberation from male dominance and continued as such throughout their life. It is sad to learn that the 1984 expedition left a bad taste in the mouth for many members. Their story never ended, not even on the fortieth anniversary in May 2024.

The last chapter of the book titled “The Black Everest” is really alarming as it shows how a new culture of dehumanisation is brought into play with commercialization of such climbs as it takes away from the very joy of ascending. At present the adventure, the romance and indeed, the thrill of mountaineering is literally reduced to a cold robotic logistic with high investment and returns, which do not necessarily go back to the mountain. The body count goes up every year, and ironically the fascination to climb Everest also rises in direct proportion to the increasingly visible thrill and danger of death in the higher reaches of the mountain. As Kak states: “My heart goes out to Everest, which appears as if it is being slowly disrobed due to self-defeating commercial priorities over and above the ravages of climate change, cataclysmic earthquakes and contamination littering its pristine slopes.” In 2023, despite all the advances in safety and technology, the highest number of people died – nearly a score – climbing Everest in a single season.

Reading this book on mountaineering by a non-mountaineer filmmaker like Siddharth Kak is a pleasurable experience. His simple, lucid style will surely entice one to pick it up and enjoy a thorough good read.

Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a retired Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

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Tags A Fire over Mount Everest, Delhi, Everest Base camp, IMF, India, Kathmandu, Mount Everest, Nepal, Penguin Random House India, Santiniketan, Siddharth Kak, Visva-Bharati

Poetry

Poetry by Pramod Rastogi

ON THE LOOKOUT FOR DREAMERS

No rain has touched these wastelands.
The earth lies stony, locked in stillness.
Dreams struggle here to take root,
And those that do soon wilt away.

Parched are the lanes of this hamlet,
Inhabited only by daydreamers
Who dream of running water
To raise rich harvests of living dreams.

Dreamers gather where the road begins.
Each chooses a direction of their own.
Wherever they wander, passion walks beside them,
Its fierce intensity breaking open obstacles.

Life is a station restless with departures.
Harvest is nearing; soon dreams will be
Separated carefully from the chaff,
Gathered at last into waiting heaps.

And then these dreams, still breathing softly,
Will go searching for new dreamers.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems

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Tags Delhi, EPFL, Gandhinagar, IIT, Jammu, Pramod Rastogi

Feature

Teresa Rehman: A Chronicler of Less Known Stories

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date May 14, 2026
No Comments on Teresa Rehman: A Chronicler of Less Known Stories

In Conversation with Teresa Rehman about Bulletproof : A Journalist’s Notebook on Reporting Conflict (Penguin Random House) and a bit about the book…

Bulletproof: A Journalist’s Notebook on Reporting Conflict by Teresa Rehman is not a new book but it’s a unique one. It is an evergreen narrative of a woman’s journey to empower herself given a wholistic family set up. Set in the northeast of India, it’s a chronicle of people who were willing to die for their beliefs. Many were young men, university students and yet they picked up guns. They just seemed to be on the wrong side of events. It makes you wonder what made them into who they were?

Rehman covers stories of women and children impacted by the conflict, the border politics with neighbouring countries, the lack of sanitation in these regions and the lack of safety and security. And perhaps, given the times, we need to read her story to figure out how history treats those that do not comply with governance for her book largely covers the ULFA (United Liberation Front of Asom) separatist movement that started in 1979. It had been dubbed an insurgent organisation in the 1990s, and then the ULFA softened its stance in the 2000s. In a way their suffering humanises militants as people who just happen to be on the wrong side of governance. She also covers stories of poachers and environmental issues. The pathos of their condition and stories are heart wrenching. What does come across is that the northeast was and continues a neglected region that cries out for funds and development, while retaining the colours of its own culture and values.

Bulletproof continues relevant raising not just issues in the northeast regions of India but also asks you to rethink many concepts … including media reporting, what can lead to PTSD and what is acceptable. It reverberates with questions that were raised later by Afsar Mohammed’s Remaking History:1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad. Can one person’s dream be another’s nightmare? It has ideas that echo concerns thrown up in Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. Did all of the people living within the borders drawn by the colonials want to integrate under a single government? Was that their dream? Is the idea of a single polity inclusive and tolerant of diversities and differences? And much more… So, who is this Teresa Rehman who wrote this evergreen classic?

Teresa Rehman is an award-winning journalist based in North-east India, known for her quiet grit and matter-of-fact approach to stories. She has worked for years toward bringing the different facets of the region, its diversity and distinct ethos to mainstream media. Teresa’s work in journalism spans through India Today, Telegraph and Tehelka before she decided to put in all her resources into launching The Thumb Print e-magazine that she edits currently. She has managed to bring in the gender perspective to her stories. A recipient of the WASH Media Awards 2009-2010, Teresa also won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award for two consecutive years – 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 for the category: Reporting on J&K and the North-east. Her keen eye for the gender angle showed through stories. And she bagged honours such as Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity 2011, Sanskriti Award 2009 for Excellence in Journalism and the Seventh Sarojini Naidu Prize 2007 for Best Reporting on Panchayati Raj by Hunger Project. She is known for her unassuming persistence on getting the details, and sensitivity. She was featured in the Power List of Femina magazine in 2012. She has written a clutch of books, The Mothers of Manipur (Zubaan Books) and Bulletproof (Penguin Random House India) are among them. She is the Treasurer of the Editors Guild of India.

These are Rehman’s achievements, but who is she really? What made her turn to reporting insurgency, an unusual choice for a woman journalist in the 1990 and early 2000s? Rehman has stepped beyond the pages of the book to share a bit about herself in this exclusive online interview.

Why did you opt to become a journalist? Tell us a bit about Teresa, the young girl.

I often tell people that I did not choose journalism but journalism chose me. With infectious enthusiasm, my mother carefully collected an array of books, magazines, coins, stamps – neatly packed and stored in old tin boxes of chocolates and cookies. As a child, my aunt recalls that I was quiet, courteous and a well-behaved girl. I used to immerse myself in my mother’s erratic accumulation of books, journals and magazines. I used to sit in a corner and browse through them though I couldn’t wrap my head around most of it. It was the pre-internet era in the 1980s and my parents encouraged us to read and write. I am a first-generation journalist and that makes me the only black sheep of the family. I did not have too many friends and was rather awkward in social gatherings. I would rather sit in a quiet corner and simply browse through old issues of the Illustrated Weekly of India, Reader’s Digest, Femina, Women’s Era, Savvy, Target (a magazine for young adults), Wisdom etc. My mother used to subscribe to these magazines. This curiosity and the childhood fantasy of imagining myself in those bylines gradually made me write for the children’s pages in the local newspapers. I remember writing in longhand, going to the post-office, and posting my articles to the editors of the local newspapers. And I used to be elated when they were published. It had almost turned me into a child celebrity. And this recognition thrilled me.

And this childhood zeal unknowingly turned into a passion for journalism. After my graduation in English Literature from Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi, it almost seemed natural for me to enrol for a course in journalism. And I picked up the basics of journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC)in Delhi. Thereafter, there was no looking back. Starting my career as a trainee journalist with the India Today magazine in Delhi, I got an opportunity to work with some of the best editors of the country . However, I found that desk job was too tedious. I longed to be on the field and report from the ground. Thereafter, I had to shift base from Delhi to Guwahati due to my mother’s ill-health. Back in Guwahati, I joined the northeast bureau of The Telegraph newspaper and handled the Features desk. Thereafter, I joined as the Principal Correspondent for Tehelka magazine where I got an opportunity to travel to nook and corner of the region and report hardcore conflict.

You were in the middle of gunfights in Bulletproof. Why did you call your book as such when it shared much about gun violence?

The title of the book, ‘Bulletproof’ has an interesting story. At a conference of women journalists from South Asia, I was at a session on reporting conflict. As the discussion flowed, the moderator asked me, ‘Do you wear a bulletproof jacket when you go reporting?’ This simple question rattled me. I had been reporting hardcore conflict from one of the most insurgency ravaged regions of the world. It was a region that had witnessed several decades of violence and bloodshed. Reporting from such a region has a fear factor that is real. There were occasions when I was nearly ambushed while I was on the ground reporting. I was unaware that bulletproof jackets existed for journalists reporting from a conflict zone. I got to know about a drill called the Hostile Environment and First Aid Training (HEFAT), a training programme for journalists working for international media outlets. So, when I had decided to write a memoir about my reporting experiences, I decided to call it ‘Bulletproof’ in the sense that we journalists reporting from northeast India are bulletproof. We go to the field with just a pen, notebook, mobile phone (now) and our intuition to guide us. We go unprepared for all the physical as well as psychological hazards that journalists have to face while reporting conflict. As I was one of the few women journalists reporting hardcore conflict and a low-intensity war, Bulletproof is a first-of-its-kind account and a story of a female combat journalist and her encounters with insurgency from northeast India.

What pushed you into reporting about communities living in the margins, even militants?

Most people who live in mainland India know very little about the northeast, beyond maybe a handful of facts, stereotypes or broad generalisations.The region is often ghettoised as a monolith. When you report from a conflict zone like Northeast India, it is imperative that you report on conflict and its various implications. Reporting from the periphery has its pitfalls. It was not a choice but a compulsion. An editor of a national media outlet had, in fact, even told me that conflict sells though northeast India does not sell. Once I got into reporting hardcore conflict and could meet several militant leaders, I got an opportunity to understand the nuances of conflict from close quarters. I tried to comprehend what made a boy barely out of his teens to grab the AK 47. I could drift into the lives of women and children who are the collateral victims in any kind of conflict situation. Going beyond mere statistics, of deaths and arms recovered, and other documentary evidence, it shows us how conflict impacts women, children, health, environment, sanitation, wildlife and society. This book is a collection of rare human stories from one of the most under-reported regions in the world.

Your book demystified militants. Did you feel scared meeting them? What was your reaction? Why did they never attack you?

A chapter in my book is titled ‘Militants turned Mediapersons’. The publicity wing of any militant group is one of the most important wings. Therefore, they would welcome journalists visiting them. They understood the power of the media therefore they were willing to provide any kind of information and guidance to a journalist eager to report on them. Though most of them were awkward while meeting a female journalist like me. Conflict reporting seems very masculine – full of stories of artillery, statistics, guns, weapons, soldiers, militants, peace talks, and often dry press releases. The sub-plots, the stories of the common people, especially of women and children, are often unaccounted for. More so, a woman consistently reporting hardcore conflict from the region is unheard of. I was young and restless to get my story. Therefore, I persisted.

What makes militants different from the mainstream? How and why did such people resort to violence?

The people who took up arms for a ‘cause’ did it for various reasons – ideological, social, cultural. They are also termed as non-state actors who sometimes run a parallel administration along with the state government. Some people may resent their presence but for many of their own community, they are also local heroes. It’s just a matter of what lens you use to look at them.

You sometimes took your children along for the interviews. Were you not apprehensive of how they would impact your children? Did they ever harm you, your children or your family? Elaborate on why.

My children were part of my life. I remember my elder daughter accompanying me when I had gone to meet the poachers. She quietly sat with me. On one occasion she was engrossed playing with the children of the village. In fact, after I had reported on the fake encounter in Manipur, I was grilled by various investigating agencies including the CBI, SIT and the Judicial Commission. I was expecting my second child then. I had difficulty walking up the stairs when I had gone to the CBI office in Guwahati. I had sought recuse from being called to Imphal, the capital of Manipur because I was getting veiled threats from various quarters. My girls grew up seeing their absent-minded mother who had at times forgotten to change their diapers as she was busy filing a story from her laptop.

How are people living in the margins different from mainstream?

People are the same everywhere. It’s just the difference in resources and basic amenities, roads, communication etc that makes it difficult for them. For instance, many parts of the northeast are still inaccessible because of the difficult geographical terrain. Most parts are still pristine, untouched by the ugly face of development. However, the prolonged conflict and the low-intensity war has taken a toll in the minds and hearts of the people.

Can the marginalised be integrated into the mainstream? Explain your stance.

It depends on what you perceive as the mainstream and what is the margin. And is integration even needed? Connectivity and linkages are important in terms of basic amenities and resources, while preserving diversity. But I would prefer inclusive development over forced integration. Unity in diversity is an ideal situation.

Were you scared or apprehensive while reporting on them?

Reporting from a conflict zone has a fear factor that is real. I would be lying if I said that I did not get scared while I was on the field. I was aware of the risks I was taking on. But I never went prepared. I was armed only with my pen, notebook and my intuition. I simply assumed that I would be safe and if anything went wrong, I might have to think of ways to wriggle my way out. A safety gear or bulletproof jacket did not exist for me. It’s not that I was oblivious to the fact that all over the world female journalists are killed, assaulted, threatened and defamed. In fact, it was much later that I learnt that, in order to help women journalists stay safe in unsafe regions, International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) provides the much-needed Hostile Environment and First-Aid Training (HEFAT). In HEFAT courses, journalists participate in both classroom-based learning and real-life scenarios that simulate situations that journalists may encounter in the field. I had personally encountered some of these situations like emergency first-aid, digital security, personal security, civil unrest, emotional care, and checkpoint navigation. But I went without any training or briefing. And I was oblivious of my own safety — both physical and mental. I was young and passionate. And getting the story right was all that mattered.

What was your most memorable experience?

In a positive sense, I have had the opportunity to travel to remote parts of Northeast India and report on the lives of common men, women and children. I was pained by how the long-pronged conflict impacted lives. However, the stories of conflict that I had tried to report with empathy and a deeper understanding that, in turn, showed me the humane side of hostility.

Did this reporting have an impact on you? On your family? How did you tackle it?

Yes, as every other human being,I was affected by the trauma caused by reporting conflict. In fact, I had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after all that I had to go through after my reportage on the fake encounter in Manipur. I had become irritable and angry on witnessing the aftermath that led to a civil uprising in the state. It was a lonely battle for me. This is why I have been advocating for the physical and mental safety of journalists.

Did your being a woman make a difference?

I often tell people that you can either be a good journalist or a bad journalist. But, in reality your gender does come into play, especially when you are reporting from the margins, a conflict zone and a difficult geographical terrain. Being a woman in a conflict zone is fraught with dangers and that includes sexual assault. I often carried pepper spray (which I never had to use), in my grab bag. Moreover, there are practical problems like lack of toilets for women on the field and even in the workplace. Most media houses that survive on contractual workers do not have provisions of maternity leave for their female employees. There are many women who have to drop-out midway at the peak of their career as they have to engage themselves in childbearing and rearing. There is a need for a support system like a creche, for instance for working journalists, both men and women.

What would be your advice for young journalists?

I believe that journalists will come and journalists will go. More so, the mediums of delivering news are changing with the fast-evolving technology. The newsrooms have evolved from being confined to a structured building to the knapsack of a journalist who is now equipped with a mobile phone, popularly known as a mojo. With the rise of digital tools, almost everyone is transformed into a content communicator or a publisher now. This has blurred the lines between personal interaction and public content creation.

However, the cardinal principles of truth and objectivity of an upright shoe-leather journalist will stand the test of time. The fundamental values and ethics of storytelling remain timeless, acting as a crucial, enduring, and non-negotiable tool for human connection, empathy, and truth-telling, even as mediums adapt to the digital age.

(This review and online interview by email is by Mitali Chakravarty)

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Click here to access Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems

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Musings

Where Stories Find You…

By Gowher Bhat

There are places in this world that do not seek attention. They exist quietly and hold something essential. In such spaces, differences soften. What remains is a simple sense of connection.

The Sunday Book Bazaar of Daryaganj, now at Mahila Haat near Delhi Gate, is one such place. Every Sunday this space fills slowly. The city moves in its usual rhythm, yet here time seems to settle into something gentler. People begin to arrive from many walks of life. Students come with curiosity. Collectors arrive with patience shaped over years. Families walk through the narrow lanes with children who pause at almost every stack. Some come with purpose. Others arrive without any clear intention. Yet all seem drawn by something they cannot fully explain.

A bookseller looks up and smiles at a passerby. “What are you looking for, sir?” he asks.

The question lingers for a moment. The answer does not come easily. Perhaps that is how most people arrive here. Not searching for something specific, but open to possibilities.

Within this space, differences begin to evaporate. People stand side by side, turning pages, asking questions, sharing small discoveries. Conversations form and dissolve with ease. What remains is a shared interest in stories and knowledge. In that quiet exchange something simple takes shape. People come closer without effort.

For more than six decades this bazaar has existed as a home for books and readers. What began in 1964 has grown into a living space that continues to gather voices across time. Books lie in uneven stacks that rise and fall like small landscapes. Some are worn with age, their pages softened by many hands. Others remain untouched, waiting for their first reader.

A reader pauses at a stack and picks up a worn paperback. The cover is slightly faded. The pages carry the faint scent of time. A nearby voice observes gently, “Old edition. Hard to find now.”

There is quiet assurance in such words. Years spent among books leave their own kind of memory. Titles are not just remembered. They become familiar, almost like people one has known for a long time.

Books move through this space with a quiet freedom. A thought written years ago finds meaning in the present. A story that began in a distant place settles into a new life. Each exchange is simple, yet it carries something lasting. In these movements books connect people without effort.

There is comfort in that continuity.

The booksellers who sustain this space form its quiet centre. Many have spent years, even decades, among these pages. Their knowledge is shaped through experience and repetition. They know where a book might be found. They sense what a reader may need. Often, they understand before a question is fully spoken.At another stall a name is mentioned in passing. The response comes without hesitation. “If it is not here today, it will be found.”

There is no urgency in the voice. Only certainty. It is a certainty built not on systems, but on familiarity and care. Their interactions remain simple and unforced. A suggestion is offered. A brief conversation begins. A moment of connection follows. During these exchanges, the act of selling becomes something more. It becomes a quiet way of keeping stories alive.

In their own way, they create bridges between people who might otherwise have continued remain strangers.

As one moves through the bazaar, small moments begin to gather meaning. A child sits on the ground, absorbed in a book that seems to hold engross. A student moves from one stack to another, choosing carefully, balancing interest with affordability. An older reader pauses with a book in hand, holding it for a little longer, as if revisiting something once known.

Nearby a young voice carries a quiet excitement. “This one was only fifty[1].”

The reply comes with an easy smile. “That is a good find.”

The exchange is brief, yet it holds a sense of completeness. At such moments, the value of something is not measured by price alone, but by the joy of discovery.

These are not merely transactions. They are connections between people and ideas. Each book that changes hands leaves behind something unseen, yet quietly lasting.

Around the books other objects carry fragments of time. Old coins rest in small boxes. Stamps lie arranged with care. Postcards show places that may no longer look the same. Each object holds a story that extends beyond itself.

A gentle question arises. Do people still come for these?

The answer is simple. “They do. Some have been coming for years.”

Memory does not disappear easily. It finds ways to remain present, often in the simplest forms.

In a world that moves quickly such spaces feel rare. Here there is no rush to finish. One can pause without purpose. One can browse without intention. One can sit with a book and allow time to move at its own pace.

There is also a quiet sense of trust that shapes this place. A book may be handed over without hesitation. A familiar face is recognised without effort. A price may soften in a moment of understanding.

“Take it,” a voice says gently. “You can pay next time.”

Such gestures do not draw attention to themselves. Yet they remain long after the moment has passed.

The bazaar continues despite its challenges. Facilities are limited. Weather often interrupts the day. At times the space must adjust and adapt. Yet it endures — not through ease, but through persistence and care.

Perhaps that is what gives it its meaning.

Because this space is not only about books. It’s about access. It’s about memory. It’s about people sharing something simple and real. It allows stories to continue moving. It allows connections to form without effort.

It offers a quiet reminder. When people come together with openness something meaningful begins to take shape.

As the day moves towards its close the space begins to thin out. The stacks remain. The voices grow softer. Yet something lingers in the air, something that cannot be easily named.

A small gesture remains. A bookmark is handed over, light and unassuming.

“For your reading,” comes the gentle voice.

On it a single line rests.

Some stories find you.

The words feel simple, yet they stay.

As one leaves the bazaar there is a quiet awareness that follows. Not every visit is planned. Not every discovery is expected. Some moments arrive without effort and remain without intention.

Sometimes stories find us.

They arrive at the turning of a page. In a passing conversation. In something remembered long after the day has ended. They remind us of what we share, even when we do not speak of it.

In a fast-paced world, such spaces offer something steady. They remind us that connection still exists in simple forms, that stories continue to travel without barriers, that meaning does not always need to be sought. Sometimes it appears quietly, in places we might overlook.

[1]Fifty rupees or USD 0.53

Gowher Bhat is a columnist, freelance journalist, beta reader, book reviewer, avid reader, and educator from Kashmir, and a published author of both fiction and nonfiction. He serves as a senior columnist for several local newspapers across the Kashmir Valley.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Tags Daryaganj, Delhi, Delhi Gate, Gower Bhat, Kashmir, Sunday Book Bazaar