The Decades Old Book Bazaar

Every Sunday, book lovers from the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad arrive in Saddar to browse their infamous, decades-long book bazaar, where stalls offer used and pirated books at below-market prices. These stalls are, by nature, a temporary space, only there for one day of the week, yet their consistency over time has carved out a permanent presence, to the point where it is disconcerting to visit Saddar on a rainy day and find them absent. My own relationship to these stalls is a multi-generational one; both my grandfather and mother have been visiting these stalls since before I was born. My own earliest memory of these stalls dates back to my disgruntlement when I was 11, unhappy about living in another city that didn’t have these stalls. Often, when browsing through the books, I find traces of people who read them before me, a name written on a schoolbook, old pamphlets, annotations, a note to the person that the book was gifted to or an old photograph, all visceral reminders of the people who read and loved them, and I wonder: what will become of my books after me?