Why Bareilly’s landmark Syndicate Book House may find it difficult to reopen after the second wave
After running the shop for over 40 years, co-founder Santosh Verma all but acknowledges it cannot survive now. Santosh Verma and her Syndicate Book House in Bareilly.
“We were happy because we could not go anywhere else,” mused the nostalgic narrator of Nirmal Verma’s 1972 novel,
Days Of Longing. The same sentiment may have been felt by another young man who, on a quiet afternoon decades later, made his way to Syndicate Book House in the small North Indian town of Bareilly.
He had played in the bookstore as a child, just before he and his family moved to another city, and with the passage of time and other distractions, Bareilly had become a vague memory. But what this young adult remembered clearly was the small debt he owed to Syndicate’s cheerful owner – even though she, most likely, would not remember him at all.