Over a dozen shelves stuffed with books were underwater around 2pm on Tuesday.
Five men were using buckets to drain the water out.
This was one publisher, Abhijan. College Street, Calcutta’s beloved Boi Para, is dotted with many such publishing houses and hundreds of bookshops. Almost all of them were underwater.
No one had an estimate of the damage from the rain.
The first racks of Abhijan Publisher, located on Bankim Chatterjee Street, had books that were soaked and softened.
Efforts to drain out the water had little effect because the water level on the streets was hardly receding.
Maruf Hossain, the bookstore’s owner, said he did not know if they could ever recover from the losses.
“A book is like a son or daughter to us. We have an umbilical bond. It’s a business and a passion. Once a book is wasted, it hurts more than anything else,” said Hossain.
Pratap Pal of Loknath Book Store, who has two stalls, was cursing the delayed start of the undergraduate admissions for his loss.
Pal said usually the sales of undergraduate books get over by August. This year, the admission process started on August 22.
“The sales began in early September. As the admission process is still on, we procured fresh stocks. The entire stock is damaged,” said Pal.
The mop-up rounds of undergraduate admissions will continue till September 24.
The flooding forced Calcutta University to suspend academic and administrative activities in all its seven campuses. “No one could enter the campuses,” said CU registrar Debasis Das.