Gems in the dirt: Weekly book bazaar at Regal Chowk offers a wealth of books

Every Sunday, the vendors lay out something for everyone on floor mats on the pavement.

KARACHI: It is early on Sunday morning. As the city slumbers, vendors, wholesalers and scrap collectors lug sacks on their backs, throwing them in the back of a few Suzuki pick-up trucks that idle on the normally busy road in Saddar. The street is scattered with the dirt and piles of trash that are a usual feature of Karachi's roads but there is something different about Regal Chowk.

Here, amid the filth, there is treasure — a wealth of books laid out for avid readers, collectors of rare books and students in search of cheap course-books.

Laden with books in genres ranging from fiction to curriculum to biographies to thrillers to Urdu digests, the vendors make their way to Regal Chowk at 7am, staying there till late in the day. At the bazaar, enthusiasts fish for their pick through the piles that most of the vendors heap upon floor mats spread on the footpaths. Other vendors are more organised, with their offerings classified into different categories for the ease of their customers.



Arshad, who calls himself Shahrukh Khan after his undying love for the Bollywood superstar, exclaims that he is sick of sitting in the trash with his books. "We have requested the authorities time and again to shift us to Jehangir Park nearby," he says. "That park is in ruins anyway - we can set up a permanent book bazaar there."

The vendor has been selling books at Regal Chowk since he was 14 years old; once he completed his Matriculation, there was no turning back for him. "The rest of the week, I move around the city on my bicycle collecting books so that I can sell them here amid the dirt on Sunday."

Apart from offering a serene albeit grimy oasis for book-lovers, this small marketplace also serves as a traditional trading hub. One of the vendors, Imran, who sells Robin Cook's medical thrillers and Stephen King's science fiction for Rs20 each, says that he buys them from Lines Area. "If anyone wants to buy them from me in bulk, I'll reduce the price to Rs15 daana (per piece)," he proposes.

As a handful of early risers leaf through titles such as 'Mai Toh Estate Agent Hogaya!' ('I Have Become an Estate Agent!') and 'The Inspiring Life of Abdus Salam,' the vendors discuss bargain prices for sacks of books by weight. "I bought sacks weighing a kilogramme for Rs400 each from a godown in Garden," explains Arshad. "Some schools also give us curriculum books for free so we sell them among ourselves and eventually they are sold somewhere else in the city."

While some earn some extra money through this makeshift weekly bazaar, the entire livelihood of others depends upon selling these books. Obaid, who studies in the fourth grade, helps his father gather books from around the city after school every day. Grinning as he stacks volumes of English poetry atop each other, he reveals that his brother works at a printing shop in the next street. "It's like a family business!"

Published in The Express Tribune, May 4^th, 2015.