Veena Book Centre

Veena Book Centre is over in Nagarbhavi, specifically near the Lokhandwala area. It’s been our family thing for a long time. The shop is full of books, obviously, but they are piled up everywhere. We try to keep some order with the school books in one corner and the stories in another, but customers always move things around. There is that smell of old paper that hits you as soon as you walk in. Some people love it, others sneeze. We have a lot of students coming in asking for specific textbooks that are always hard to find. We spend a lot of time calling around to see if we can get a copy for them. The Lokhandwala part of Nagarbhavi is pretty active. We don't have fancy lights or a computer system that actually works all the time. Most of the time we just write things down in a big ledger. It’s an old-fashioned way of doing things, I guess, but it works for us. My hands are usually a bit grey from the ink and the dust. The front window gets a lot of sun, so the covers of the books there sometimes fade out. We should probably put up a curtain, but then nobody would see we are open. It’s just us and the books, every day from morning until late evening. Sometimes the cat from next door comes in and sleeps on the poetry section.