The Bookshop I Somehow Always Missed 📚

How an old, hidden bookshop sparked my love for reading ✨

It’s the early 2000s in Hyderabad.

The internet hasn’t become the center of our universe yet.

Summer vacations for us meant mangoes, cricket on rooftops, Indian dramas on cable TV, wandering around the neighbourhood with friends, and the constant search for ways to escape boredom (yes, teenagers did get bored back then).

On a hot June evening, I was wandering through the familiar streets of our neighborhood when I spotted something I’d somehow always missed.

It was a tiny, old bookshop.

Curious, I stepped inside.

An elderly man with thick glasses looked up from behind a cluttered counter. When I asked about buying books, he kindly smiled and said, "Do kitabein de jao, aik kitab le jao" (Give two books, take one).

With the prospect of a long, boring summer staring me in the face, I asked the old man to hold the offer.

I rushed home and gathered every old course book I could find.

My mother wasn’t very happy with this. For some reason, she never liked giving away old textbooks—maybe she was saving them for my sister (who was seven years younger than me).

After some negotiation, she reluctantly agreed. I quickly packed up the old books and headed to the bookshop before she changed her mind.

Back at the shop, I looked for the most value-for-money option. While browsing through the books, the Reader's Digest condensed novels caught my eye—each had four stories in one volume.

I knew nothing about these books or their authors. But they seemed like they’d keep me busy for a while. I exchanged my textbooks for four of them.

And that's how my love story with books began. Since then, I've been an avid reader, always with a book nearby.

This habit of reading is the foundation of my writing. The more I read, the better I write.

Psychology Corner

Reading fiction improves our understanding of people. It stretches our imagination in ways that we feel the characters' hopes, fears, and dilemmas as our own.

Regular readers develop stronger "theory of mind"—the ability to understand others' thoughts, feelings, and perspectives.

This enhanced empathy and perspective-taking is a superpower for writers.

In "The Sense of Style," Cognitive Scientist and Psycholinguist Steven Pinker explains that extensive reading exposes us to effective language patterns that we absorb and later incorporate into our own writing.

“Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks, and with them a sensitivity to how they mesh and how they clash.”

Read on.