A 68-year-old Seremban bookstore burns down, leaving behind memories, traditions and a deep sense of loss for generations who grew up with SBC.
IN Seremban, we do not always realise what is precious until it is gone.
A few days ago, a 68-year-old family-run bookstore was reduced to ashes in a fire. For many, it was just another news report – numbers, losses and damage.
But for some of us, it felt like losing a part of ourselves. Because that bookstore had a name: SBC Book Store.
It was not just a shop; it was a household name – the kind you didn’t need to explain. If you grew up in Seremban, you knew it.
Before the school year began, before January settled in, parents and children would find their way there. It was a ritual.
Long before big chains like Popular Holdings arrived, before the polished aisles of MPH Bookstores became familiar, there was SBC – crowded, slightly chaotic but always alive.
That was where my mother went first – long before I existed.
She walked those aisles, choosing what she could afford, believing quietly but firmly that books mattered and her siblings did the same.
It was never about abundance; it was about intention. Years later, my siblings and I followed. We did not think of it as anything special then; it was simply where you went.
The shelves were close, the stacks sometimes uneven and the air filled with the smell of paper and possibility.
There were exam workbooks piled high, plastic-wrapped comics and storybooks that promised escape from the small, familiar rhythms of town life.
It was where becoming a reader began. And then, without realising it, I returned again – this time as a mother. I bought books for my children there too.
By then, the world had already shifted. Books were easier to get, faster to buy and endlessly available online. Convenience had replaced ritual.
But still, I chose SBC because some places are not about efficiency; they are about continuity.
I wanted my children to stand where I once stood – to pick up a book not because it was recommended but because something about it felt right – to be part of something that existed before them.
But even as I did that, I knew something was changing. Places like SBC were becoming rarer.
We often speak of progress as something visible – new developments, bigger stores, modern convenience.
But what we do not talk about enough is the quiet erosion that comes with it. The loss of places that cannot be replicated.
SBC was not just a business; it was part of the town’s rhythm – a place where generations crossed paths without knowing it and where parents who once bought their own schoolbooks would return years later with their children, standing in the same space, repeating the same ritual.
When a place like that disappears, something deeper disappears with it.
Yes, the shop can be rebuilt, the shelves can be replaced and the books can return but you cannot rebuild time.
You cannot recreate the decades of footsteps that wore down those aisles.
You cannot bring back the familiarity of a place that existed unchanged while the rest of the world moved on.
And for our children, that loss is even more profound. My children have books – many books.
But their stories arrive differently now – delivered in boxes, chosen by algorithms, detached from place.
They will read. But they may never fully understand what it means to belong to a place like SBC – a place that remembers you because it has remembered your family.
And perhaps that is what makes this loss so heavy – not the fire, not the damage but the realisation that places like this do not come back the same.
We will rebuild the shop but we will not get back the years.
Hashini Kavishtri Kannan is the assistant news editor at theSun.
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