There are certain roads or areas of a bazaar which are more full of activity and colour and where you can loiter about looking at things and enjoying yourself. They attract large crowds and are always brimming with life.
In the town where I have lived for the most part of my life had always been known for a little road lined by bookshops and shoe shops (an odd combination, to say the least) on both sides with some cloth and readymade garments shops sandwiched between these two kinds of shops. I remember visiting this area with my father ever since I was three years old. The road was and is still called Dispensary Road.
This used to puzzle many people as they wondered why a road, which should have been known as Book Road (as the book shops outnumbered all other shops there) was named Dispensary Road. I discovered the reason after quite a few years as the veterinary hospital and dispensary located on the road was beyond the bookshops, which I used to visit and turn back from there itself. And as I never owned a pet, I never needed to visit that popular veterinary unit.
The road was busy throughout the day and students, from schools and colleges, thronged the bookshops selling textbooks, notebooks and stationery. The good old chowmein joint at the corner provided them with a snack break while they bought their books and met other students. It was, you can say, a meeting point for students as well as other book buyers as some of the shops (at least till the Eighties) had very interesting secondhand novels and comics, sometimes offering rare editions long out of print.
This little road of my once little town, much like the world around it, could not stay like that. Over the years, the secondhand bookshops vanished and so did some very expert shoemakers. But still, the atmosphere was quite the same and one liked to go for a stroll through the street, taking in the colours and excitement of the lively place.
But a few months ago, the shops were pulled down and the road was widened. The Dispensary, after which the road is still known, was shifted out before that. A huge shopping complex has taken its place and it is to this shopping plaza that the old bookshops and cloth shops
have been shifted. Recently I happened to go there, looking for a book. I felt totally lost as all the landmarks, familiar to me since childhood, had gone. There was an air of wilderness. No crowds outside the shops, hardly any shop on the road and even the chowmein chap was gone. The old shopping complex on the right and the new jazzy one on the left were almost deserted.
The dispensary and its patients are no more there. So one can say that in its new ‘avatar’, this road evokes no feelings or memories and nor does it grab the interest of any visitor. It is now just a wide road where a few remnants of the good old shops stand, looking rather lost and confused. All the shops have been bundled into the complex. They are no longer breathing and vibrant as they used to be, right in the middle of things, active and bright.
So there is no dispensary now on Dispensary Road and hardly any bookshops. So one cannot think of it any longer as Book Road (as some people had named it among themselves).
I have not yet gathered the courage to go and look for the shops inside the complex. I regret that I had not taken any photographs of the street as it used to be till earlier this year. How I wish I had done so and kept them for memory’s sake. As reminders of a little road full of books in a not so little town.
Yes, the town has grown into a capital city. The roads are wider, cleaner. The shopping complexes are growing in number. But the spirit of the place is getting killed. It is dying a not so slow death. And with it are dying our favourite areas, our familiar places and also our memories associated with these places. But in this fast run for change and ‘progress’, who is bothered what happens to a dear book street called Dispensary RoadIJ