It was a pavement stall for used magazines. It had been standing on this spot for decades. One day last year, the stall didn’t open. Weeks passed, the stall didn’t open. Months passed, the stall didn’t open.
This afternoon, the stall is open, standing at its usual spot on Connaught Lane, the pedestrian-friendly stretch connecting Kasturba Gandhi Marg to Janpath Road.
“I was unwell,” stall proprietor Rakesh Kumar explains, giving reason for the long absence. The stall looks as rooted to the place as the sky above, making it difficult to believe that it was closed for half a year. As always, it is stacked with old issues of the New Yorker and Economist, along with a couple of UK Vogues, and one or two Architecture Digests, plus a torn copy of Newsweek, dated 1997, with the entire issue devoted to Princess Diana’s tragic death. The stall is also stacked with novels.
“Last August, while at the stall, I felt a sharp pain here,” the vendor says, putting a finger on his right chest. He goes on to give the full details of the health crisis that obliged him to stay out of work for such a long time. A complicated surgery was also involved. “My madam took care of me,” he says, referring to his wife. “I reopened the stall a few days ago.”
Rakesh Kumar arrived in Delhi from his village in Bihar in 1996, and took over this already-existing stall from a relative. Since then, his daily life would follow a set pattern.
Every morning, at seven, he would wake up at his pad in Shahdara—his wife, Suman Devi, and daughters Khushi and Sadhvi would stay in the village. He would prepare his lunch of rotis and subzi, and reach Connaught Lane by nine, where he would set up the wayside stall, carefully arranging magazines and books on a wooden plank resting on plastic chairs. He would shut the stall at eight in the evening. Every Sunday, he would hunt across the city for used magazines and books. The pattern continued until the health-related interruption.
To tell the truth, while the stall remained shut, the lane carried on with its daily life as if nothing were lost. Now that the stall is back, it again appears unthinkable to imagine the lane without it.
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