Sunday mornings at the Regal Chowk book bazaar

The best bookshop in Karachi opens once a week, on the pavement, and closes when the sun gets too high.

If you want to find me on a Sunday between eight and eleven, do not call. I will be crouched on the pavement near Regal Chowk with my hands black from newsprint, arguing with a man called Rafiq about the price of a water-damaged Faber edition of Larkin.

The Sunday book bazaar has been in Saddar for as long as anyone I know can remember. The sellers lay their stock on sheets of cloth and plastic along the pavement: medical textbooks from the 1980s, Reader's Digest condensed books, Urdu digests with lurid covers, Soviet children's books in English translation with beautiful illustrations, and every so often something that makes your heart stop. A first edition of Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi. A Penguin Modern Classic with someone's name and a date from 1963 written inside the cover in fountain pen.

The provenance of a second-hand book

I buy those books for the names as much as the texts. Karachi has always been a city people leave, and when they leave, their books come here. A box of Agatha Christies with a Bath Island address stamped inside. A shelf's worth of Faiz and Rilke from a house in PECHS, every margin full of pencil notes in a careful hand. You can reconstruct a whole family from what they read and what they underlined, which is more or less what I did for the Zaidi family in my novel.

Rafiq has been selling here for twenty-two years. He cannot read English, he told me once, but he can tell you which books will sell from the weight and the spine and the condition of the paper. He prices by instinct and by the look on your face. If you pick something up too eagerly, it costs Rs 400. If you pick it up as if you are doing him a favour, Rs 150. I have been trying to master the second face for eleven years.

What I love most is that nothing is sorted. In a real bookshop you find what you came for. At Regal Chowk you find what you did not know existed. Last month, under a pile of chemistry guides, I found a 1958 Karachi telephone directory. I have spent more hours with it than with any novel this year, reading the names and the addresses and imagining who answered those phones.

How to go, if you have never been

Go early, before nine, because by eleven the sun is on the pavement and the best stock is gone. Bring small notes, never a five thousand. Do not bring a tote bag that looks expensive. Go with a list and then ignore it. And when you find something, ask the seller where it came from. Half the time they know: a house in Garden East being cleared, a professor's widow, a library closing down. That story is part of what you are buying.

My study shelves are about one third Regal Chowk now. They are the books I reach for when I am stuck, not because they are better than new ones, but because each one has already lived a life before it came to me, and that makes it easier to believe that the thing I am writing might live one too.