This is a portrait of Goobe’s, painted on the canvas of my life. A love story, as it goes. Brief, intense, the kind in which I found some long lost aspect of myself, ending in a goodbye that came too soon, the result of outside forces I could not control. Set in eight rather tumultuous months I spent in Bangalore. It’s also a story of hope.
If you’ve read any of the previous pieces and are wondering if I’ve abandoned the First Impressions approach entirely, well, I don’t quite know either. Bear with me?
Goobe’s and I met entirely by accident.
It was a pleasant evening. I was walking down Church Street amidst the bustling crowds that gather every weekend, earphones in, volume high enough to subdue the incessant din. There I was, running a good pretence of a well-adjusted person out and about, when a sharp pain in my foot jolted me back to reality. Looking around rather angrily, I found the culprit to be a small signboard placed on the footpath, next to a set of stairs that led to a basement. The sign read Goobe’s, the O’s drawn into an owl, written in chalk. Underneath, a buy one get one offer on pre-loved books.
Near the entrance, a large black and white artwork of a vast library, with owls at the base of shelves, engrossed in their books. A good thing to walk past on your way in.
Naturally, I hobbled downstairs, pain and anger subdued.
The space was a basement, lit warmly, with lime green walls and industrial metal shelves running floor to ceiling. Used books and new books in roughly equal measure, all organised by genre. Posters, stickers, photographs covering whatever wall the shelves had left free. Goobe means “owl” in Kannada by the way. Something I only discovered when writing this piece. Maybe I’m not as inherently curious as I’d like to be.
The used books section was the best I’ve come across. Not for volume but for what’s actually in it. This is not the usual second hand shelf of the same ten authors you find everywhere. It goes deeper and stranger, surprising on every visit. It’s like a love affair where you keep finding new things no matter how well you know each other, keeps you hooked.
My favourite find there was an old copy of Salesman in Beijing - Arthur Miller’s diary of the months he spent helping stage Death of a Salesman in China — a quintessentially American play performed for an audience with a completely different cultural landscape, still finding its footing after Mao. The book has been out of print for years and I haven’t found it anywhere since. I had also bought my copy of Death of a Salesman there, on an earlier visit. Destiny, in a way.
Goobe’s also offered a twenty percent discount on new books and would order anything they didn’t stock. It was one of the few places where reading remained accessible in the physical form, irrespective of your preferences or class.
I bought books from Goobe’s the way people buy groceries. As a necessity and usually without ceremony. Most of what I read during those eight months in Bangalore came from there.
In my mind, there are two kinds of relationships. First, the kind you want to keep secret, afraid that letting them into the world would make them lose their magic. And second, the kind you want to stand on a rooftop and announce to anyone who’ll listen. Ours was the second kind. I took every single friend who came to Bangalore to Goobe’s, sometimes before anywhere else. It is, in my very objective opinion, the first place anyone in Bangalore ought to visit.
On my last visit before I left the city, I finally asked Ravi, who owns the store, for a recommendation. He suggested The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Climate fiction, set in a near future where the world is finally being forced to reckon with itself. Meenakshi was working that day too. She suggested something else entirely, something I’d never have picked up on my own - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. A classic of absurdism, she said, with the kind of enthusiasm that makes you want to read something immediately.
There is this one evening that I think about more than any of the other visits. There was a panel discussion of comic book and graphic novel writers at the store. The shelves had been moved towards the walls to make space and coffee table books were stacked on the floor as makeshift seating. There were four speakers and about a dozen or so of us in the audience. I sat and listened for an hour and a half. The writers spoke about their lives, their work, what it takes to keep making things.
What stayed with me most was the difficulty of the path they had chosen. All of them had walked away from things society considers quintessential — corporate jobs, fancy degrees, even relationships. It looked like it had been worth it.
I had quit my job that morning, and was looking ahead at an indefinite stretch of unemployment. And yet, it was the first evening in months that the voices in my head had gone quiet. I have rarely believed in fate, but I needed to be there that day.
I left Bangalore without saying a proper goodbye. I’d told myself I’d go one last time, and then didn’t. I’ve never been good with farewells.
Goobe’s is still there on Church Street, in its basement, behind its chalkboard sign. If you’re ever in Bangalore, please go down the stairs. Tell them I said Hello.