Page Turner

At 86,Malhotra is a weathered old man. But he has the puckish charm of a dog-eared book and several stories to share. Like how a trip to Europe in 1956 opened his eyes to the great democratisation of reading in the world. Or of a meeting with Allan Lane,the founder of Penguin,who warned him of how tough the Indian market could be to crack. Or how,as a young publisher,he travelled across the country,striking up friendships with newspaper hawkers and vendors and convincing them to sell the new books. “I had tea with them,chatted them up. I gave them small wire racks for free so that they could display the books. These relationships I forged were the secret of my success,” he says. In a few years,Hind Pocket Books had got an enviable list of authors like Khwaja Ahmad Abbas,Mulk Raj Anand,Chatur Sen,Gulshan Nanda and Sahir Ludhianvi. Translations of classics from all parts of the country formed a considerable chunk of their titles. “Those books were read by everyone—from the taxi-driver and the mali to judges and housewives. Print runs of some books went up to a lakh,” he says. Later,he started a publication house for Indian literature in English,Orient,which published authors like R.K. Narayan,Kamala Markandeya and Khushwant Singh.

In 1998,he became the first Indian to receive the UNESCO’s International Book Award. He was honoured with a Padmashree in 2000 for promoting book reading in the country. It’s been over a decade now since Malhotra left the business to the next generation. His granddaughter Priyanka Malhotra now runs the Full Circle chain of book cafes as well as the Hind Pocket Books imprint. But he keeps himself busy with writing,and reading memoirs,books on travel and some fiction. Not surprisingly,he doesn’t like tomes. “I just don’t know how people can read big books,” he says. Small,as he knows,can be just as good.