The Best Seat in the House Isn't Near Any Book

There’s a green chair in my bookstore that nobody else wants, and that suits me just fine.

It sits right next to the billing counter, tucked beside a big glass window, and after the day’s work is done, this is where I disappear to. Technically, I’m still on the floor. Unofficially, I’ve clocked out and turned into the store’s unpaid, unbothered anthropologist.

Through the glass, the coffee shop next door runs its own small theatre every evening. I can’t hear a word of it, but I don’t need to. There’s a very specific hand gesture people make when they’re negotiating a business deal, and a completely different one for describing how badly someone’s day went. Faces do most of the talking anyway — the wide, unguarded laugh of good gossip, the polite closed-mouth smile of someone waiting for their turn to speak, and my personal favourite, the judgey squint reserved exclusively for other people’s life choices. I may not know the plot, but I always know the genre.

Inside, right across from my corner, the shelves run their own quieter drama — new arrivals up front, a shelf for local authors trying to get noticed, bestsellers holding court like they’ve earned it. Business hasn’t been kind to bookstores lately; maybe it’s the phones, maybe people just don’t read the way they used to. But the ones who do walk in? I find them endlessly, affectionately funny. Maybe because watching them is a bit like watching myself with better lighting.

Half the joy of a bookstore, it turns out, isn’t the books. It’s the people who’ve never technically bought one but love being in their presence. First-timers walk in like they’ve entered a museum — delighted, slightly nervous, dying to take a photo next to the “Bestsellers” sign. Then they clock the staff and, with visible disappointment, remember that they’re being watched. When someone actually approaches to help, they smile too quickly, avoid eye contact like it’s a pop quiz, and mumble something noncommittal. I get it. I’d probably do the same. Curiosity is a wonderful thing right up until someone asks if you need assistance.

But nothing this week bested the father and his three kids.

They came in, fanned out across the shelves with the focus of tiny professionals, and each picked a book they’d clearly fallen a little bit in love with. Then came Dad — and if you’ve ever met an Indian father in a bookstore, you already know where this is going. He looked at the picks with the weary authority of a man who has seen this movie before and delivered the line every desi kid has heard in some form: “You’re not even going to read this. It’s a two-day interest, that’s it.” Not cruel. Not even really annoyed. Just... performing a role he was born to play, apparently unaware that half the store, including me, was enjoying the show. He told them to pick something else. They stood their ground. He countered with the ultimate parental threat — finish this one, or no more books, ever. And the beautiful part? Everyone won. The kids kept their books. He got his taunt in. Nobody’s ego left unsatisfied. I sat there thinking of my own father, who has said some version of that exact sentence to me more times than I can count, in more or less those exact words.

A few hours later, I was somewhere in the pages of Days at the Morisaki Bookshop when a very different kind of energy walked in.

She was probably in her seventies, grey-haired, in a pink kurti and blue jeans, moving with the kind of quiet confidence that makes age look less like a limit and more like a decision. She needed a hand with the stairs — steadying herself carefully on the way up and down. But she knew precisely which book she wanted and exactly why. She greeted every staff member by memory, asked after people she hadn’t seen in months, and talked about the old days the way you’d talk about an old friend you’re hoping might visit again. And then she opened her book — no glasses, no hesitation — and read faster than I do on a good day.

She needed help getting up a flight of stairs. She needed absolutely none reading the thing she loved most in the world. There was something almost funny about it, except it wasn’t really funny at all — it just quietly rearranged what I thought a “book lover” was supposed to look like.

I still don’t sell many books from this chair. But I’m starting to think I’m collecting something else entirely.

Anjali Chinwan
At the Book Cafe of The English Book Depot