Back in 1999, when an HMV audio cassette dealer shut shop in old Delhi’s Urdu Bazaar, foreseeing cassettes being reduced to “nothing but plastic”, Javed Jamal had written him off as a madman. He wants to shift to a new trade, that’s why he is talking such rubbish, Jamal had thought. “Today, when I recall his words, I feel what he said was so true,” Jamal concedes. The 55-year-old owner of the Plaza Music Centre, “a leading store of original Islamic audio cassettes and VCDs” outside Jama Masjid Gate 1, is down to his last 200 cassettes, which he plans to sell off to a scrap dealer this year. “These cassettes take up space, and space is scarce and valuable. I can’t keep sustaining losses for something which is not destined to sell,” Jamal says. Jamal’s 8x10 feet shop, one among 50 other such shops and vendors that are part of a thriving dry fruits business here, is a hollow, dimly-lit room, with its original wares gathering dust at the farthest end. The vinyl cassettes in yellowing cases lie stacked along the three steps of the staircase leading to the storage loft. Jamal draws a soiled blue veil along a niche in the shop’s right wall, revealing the second half of his existing stock, which includes cassette albums from Silsila, Ek Rishta and Kanoon along with Bhojpuri and Kashmiri folk songs, qawwalis and lessons from the Quran and the Shariat. “I have been waiting for the past four years to clear these, but no one comes to buy them. A stray customer might walk in once a month and buy a cassette for Rs 20. But that’s it,” he says. The largest sale he ever made was worth a princely Rs 4,000 two years ago, when an Afghan picked out 200 cassettes — mostly on qawwalis and Islamic preachings. “Samajhne mein time lag gaya ki loss mein ja rahe hai (It took me a long time to realise we were running extensive losses). It was difficult to switch from a trade one had been in for 25 long years,” Jamal says, with a wave of his hands. Jamal initially put up something of a fight. When he noticed vendors selling VCDs in the Lala Lajpat Rai wholesale market, he began stacking his shop with those. He understood how natural it was for customers to prefer a format with a storage of 30 hours at just Rs 30, over a costlier and bulky cassette with a recording of one hour. “Rafi’s entire collection of 10,000 songs will fit in 50 compact discs. Then why should someone buy and stock hundreds of cassettes to house Rafi’s whole collection?” asks Jamal. While all his fellow shopkeepers switched to alternate businesses, selling books, showpieces, wall hangings and clothes much earlier, Jamal took almost three years to shift to selling dates in 2013. But, having come to terms with a changed reality in the centuries-old sameness of old Delhi, Jamal now talks like a practical businessman. “I used to be a little nostalgic about the cassettes. I soon realised the cassettes will just not sell and will keep occupying space in my shop. That’s when I sent for the scrap dealer and sold off over 4,000 tapes a year ago.” As the sun sets over the cityscape and devotees wash up for the evening prayers at the Jama Masjid, Jamal recalls crowds that gathered around the tape recorder at his shop, listening to the latest Kishore number or preachings on obedience decreed by the Quran. Jamal’s family disapproved of what he did for a living. Music is not good, they said — Jamal could never really switch to anything else. “But now, that it has happened on its own, it means Allah wanted it that way,” he says. That is how he makes peace. However, though Jamal associates cassettes with financial loss, he still holds on to the past. When Yasin, the scrap dealer, was loading his cassettes into an autorickshaw, Jamal could not resist inquiring about the fate of the tapes. “The vinyl ribbons are ripped off the plastic casings and used to string cots, the scrap dealer told me,” says Jamal. They are also used to stuff quilts when cotton is too expensive. At least, they have an afterlife Jamal adds, almost as an afterthought.
