The Bookstores in our Lives: Higginbothams

A recent story on the Higginbothams bookstores in Scroll set the nostalgia mills running in my head. Higginbothams is the earliest bookstore in my life. It is everything I associate with my childhood in Ooty, a hill town tucked in the folds of the Nilgiri hills in Western Ghats in south India. In a throwback to its colonial past, the main shopping area in Ooty was called Charring Cross, complete with tourists nibbling on freshly roasted corncobs, and a fountain from which cherubs hardly spouted water. And this was were Higginbothams was located. 

In my memory, Higginbothams was a building painted blue, with the name of the signboard painted in big white letters. The heavy doors open to a huge room-just the one- with a high ceiling, and shelves on all the walls, a large window looking on to the busy streets behind the cashier’s counter, and the most charming element for me, unpolished wooden floors. The floorboards creaked when one walked, and in the silence that I have since come to associate with cold places later in my life, the gentle groan of the floor drew attention to one’s presence easily across the shelves.

The first time I was taken to Higginbothams was after an exam. The present of books was a very tempting and a lavish prospect. At the end of the day, I was richer- a jigsaw puzzle, and two books, a Tintin comic (The Calculus Affair) and a cut-out copy of Hansel and Gretel, two of my prized possessions till date. Hansel and Gretel was an easy walk in the woods, pun intended. The Calculus Affair, on the other hand, proved incomprehensible to my 4-year old brain, for obvious reasons. My father had picked out Tintin, because he had read it in his childhood, and I picked out Tintin for the colourful pictures. It would take a couple of years and a hundred re-reads for me to understand what the comic was about, but that didn’t stop me from falling head over heels in love with the Belgian reporter.

From then on, Higginbothams would be a part of our evening strolls in the town. At dusk, the three of us (amma, achan, and I ) would set out on a walk downhill from our home to Charring Cross, and walk till the vendor of roasted peanuts and walk back, popping warm peanuts into our mouths. Some evenings, on the walk back uphill, achan would swing me on to his shoulders. Other evenings, I would walk between my parents, each of my gloved hand holding theirs. We would cross Higginbothams and I would stare through the cashier’s window, everything was warm and cosy in there, with the cashier at his desk, and books, and the wooden floorboards.

Just once have I gone to the shop next to Higginbothams, a handicraft shop selling trinkets made of bamboo and jute and coconut husk. It had similar windows looking out at the same street, but looking at the busy market scene through towering statues of wooden elephants and painting of sunsets on bamboo sheets, I realised that I preferred the view from Higginbothams, where, in spite of the high ceilings, I felt a certain warmth, and whose bare floorboards I preferred to the rich red jute carpets on the handicraft shop’s floors.

My association with Higginbothams did not end when I left Ooty at age 9. By then, my accumulation of books from there was quite sizeable- more Tintin comics, a picture book on different places around the world, my first Enid Blytons, and so much more- more than half of my childhood collections. Higginbothams was also the franchise bookstore in many railway stations in south India, so which meant that each train journey (of which there were plenty) would start with a trip to the railway book stall, if only for a magazine. Then, once we moved to Chennai, I visited the original Higginbothams in Mount Road, aka, Anna Salai- a two-storeyed white building, with books entirely different from the books of my childhood. There was no high ceiling, I had outgrown Enid Blyton, and there was no window beyond behind the cashier that I could stare through with peanut-scented breath. But, the wooden floorboards remained. A throw to Ooty from coastal Chennai.

Later, as an adult, I went to the same Higginbothams in Ooty during a trip there with my friends. I walked out of the shop empty-handed, and the gnawing voice that told me that everything changes some day.

When a friend was visiting Ooty later on, I mentioned Higginbothams to her. She sent me a picture from when she went there, and I was happy that a friend of my adult-life paid a visit to a monument from my childhood. When she left the country a few months later, she gave me a gift of books from her childhood in Seattle, in a plastic cover from Higginbothams- the co-mingling of our respective trysts with books and the worlds in them. And this is what Higginbothams will now mean to me- where I met many of my first friends, and a place, through my friends- both fictional and not, remains an organic entity with fluid meanings all throughout.