It’s the era of Covid19, life is still not back as usual. But a lot of shops have opened their shutters in the city and that includes book stores.

Since March this year, I haven’t stepped beyond the 2 kilometre radius of my house. But two days back I found out that one of the most popular book store in town had opened up.

So this weekend I had one agenda in mind – Must visit the book store!

Most of the books on my little book shelf have been read. The dust had to be shaken off my Kindle paper-white after a really long time.

But all traditional readers know it for a fact, that a Kindle can never replace a traditional book. The smell of the fresh pages. The not having to worry about the battery life. Just that feeling of physically flipping a page to get to the next paragraph. It’s just a sentimental thing.

Blossoms Book Store was open 9 am – 6 pm this Sunday. Husband drove through near empty roads to get me there. Roads that would be bustling with so much life in the past that it would have taken us at least 40 minutes to get there on any other day. But today, it took us only 20.

What surprised me was the fact that I was the only customer at their vast fiction floor. Piles and piles of books and nobody to go through them and decide if they needed a home. 

“We lived in a different era,” a lady who was ahead of me at the billing line lamented.

She had started to talk about how she used to run a small lending library but nobody came any more.

“I had to spend so much time sorting them all out,” she said, pointing to a little pile of books that she was selling to the book store. They dealt in second-hand books too.

I heard the store owner tell her how some books that used to sell like hot cakes once upon a time just didn’t have any buyers.

“Nobody reads much these days. It’s so sad,” she said.

It was sad. But at that moment I was just extremely excited about all the books that were in my hand, waiting to be taken home.

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