The Hindu Business Line : No more in good books

THE pavement bookstalls selling cheap old and new books at Flora Fountain have gone, perhaps, forever. Two black boards with press cuttings did rest against the wall a few days ago and now they are not to be seen. The men and their books will not come back as the Mumbai municipality is armed with court orders. Flora Fountain has become a no-hawking zone. As a journalist, one had enough time to spend hours there and one never visited the place with any idea of buying a book like one does while entering a formal bookstall like Strand or Oxford Book Store.

Strand offers discounts and accepts cheques, while Oxford refuses to take cheques and denies discounts. Say, after an assignment in Ballard Estate one would walk down past Horniman Circle and cross Flora Fountain and halt looking at books arranged in tiers on the pavements. Sometimes, one has bought Enid Blyton's books to finish over two runs on the local trains; some books still lie unopened at home waiting for one's retirement; quite often one picked a book for its aroma even if it was just a piece of trash.

On a Sunday one looked up one's collections built partly with now greying volumes bought in the 70s at Rs 2 and Rs 3 apiece; in recent years, prices had gone up substantially though still sold at half the listed price as the booksellers had turned smart and also had to face inflation. Today the public walk down a bareness at Flora Fountain. The booksellers have been promised relocation but every Government promise is not a legal tender. On an afternoon last week one walked up and down the pavements like some lost dog hoping the books and the hawkers would somehow turn up but they did not. Hopefully, malls and high rises will not dot the pavements as they do in central Mumbai on fine, spacious and old textile lands. None will protest when temporary shelters of construction workers are put up in central Mumbai to build malls and the rest for the rich to pulverise their wealth.

Shashi and this writer drove down to Azad Maidan to meet the protesting hawkers but they were not there. The grey pick-up van (it looks more like a dog van) of the municipality has in recent times taken on the hawkers selling tea, vada pav, sandwiches and cigarettes on H.T. Parekh Marg, which is a short strip of road opposite my office. There is insolence about the municipal van and the staff inside as they try to destroy every signature of living left by the poor on the pavements. The tea vendor and the vada pav sellers come from Karnataka, the sandwich maker from Konkan and the cigarette fellow from Bihar. Students from K.C. College and the staff from the offices on H.T. Parekh Marg apart from a few of us in Business Line are regulars. On some strange alert, the sandwich fellow lifts his burning stove while his mate picks up the wooden table and run for life as the municipal vehicle drives in. It is the same with the others and they come back after 30 minutes to ply their business when the vehicle is off. The fruit juice vendor from Kerala has no problem as he sports a licence and one saw him the other day taking the piece of paper out of a bag for examination by the municipal squad. The clients do not consider the hawkers a nuisance but surely H.T. Parekh Marg will one day become yet another no hawking zone. But then there is a set of lucky vendors near the headquarters of LIC who go about their deals in peace.

Then there are the slums. Any government has to be particularly cruel to disband shacks where dismissed human beings live in disrobed penury. It needs a stout (or at least an insensitive) heart to even look down at the tin slums of Behrampada as one walks along the railway over-bridge at Bandra. It is no way to exist: human beings, excreta, flowing gutters and slush all over. Some distance away is India's government and private banks in glass towers. Those living in glass houses in Bandra can safely throw stones as the glass towers in which they live are unbreakable. Every time one has an appointment in the banks located at BKC (Bandra-Kurla Complex) one passes by Behrampada and thanks oneself for one's comfortable existence in Borivili.

There is this argument that Mumbai cannot take any more migrants. Agreed. But can the poor who stream into the city or for that matter any city like Kolkata, New Delhi or Bangalore be shot down? The other day my good friend Abhijit Basu was telling me that Kolkata has changed with men and women from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh swamping the place. "Hindi is more often heard than Bengali," he said. My father always used to remind me that he would never have left Ashramam, a village near Suchindram, for Kolkata if there was a job going in his village. By scaring away the hawker and the sandwich maker one is denying a right to living. That's something like doing away with the poor for their poverty.

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No more in good books