Calcutta’s ‘neighborhood of books’

Through summer’s sweltering heat, through the monsoon season’s torrential downpours and even after the city’s recent accumulation of air-conditioned shopping malls, Sandhya Tiwary, 20, and her friends remain loyal to their afternoon strolls through the crowded, muddy lanes of College Street, long known as India’s “neighborhood of books.” The 1,200 dilapidated bookstore kiosks create a maze of roadside cubbyholes stacked with dusty dictionaries in Hindi, underlined chemistry textbooks in Urdu and dozens of worn copies of a three-volume “History of West Bengal.” Nearby are piles of “Mars and Venus in the Bedroom.”