The year was 1997. On February 3, six days after the inauguration, the 33rd Kolkata Book Fair was engulfed in a blaze that gutted about two-thirds of the stalls.

Flames on the Maidan fairground could be seen from across the Hooghly. More than 1,00,000 books were destroyed. One person died of a heart attack.

The affected publishers were shocked and aggrieved in equal measure. There was little hope of resumption. But Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, then the state home minister, stood amid the charred skeletons of the stalls and announced that the fair would reopen within five days.

“It was nothing short of a Herculean task that we did not think would be possible. Everything was gone,” Tridib Chatterjee, whose Patra Bharati was one of the gutted stalls, recalled to Metro.

A deeper concern plagued the members of the Publishers and Booksellers Guild, which organises the annual Book Fair.

A book fair called Grantho Mela used to be organised by the government and would be held before the Guild-organised fair. It was Bhattacharjee who stopped it in 1994. So Guild members were worried whether the fire had given the government an excuse to take over their fair.

“But Buddhababu clearly said sorkar pashe thakbe, mathay uthe boshbe na (the government would be beside us, not over our heads),” said Chatterjee.

“He set up a steering committee with five of us. I was given charge of ground security. He gave his party colleague Kanti Ganguly the charge of clearing up the fairground,” said Sudhangshu Sekhar Dey of Dey’s Publishing.

Bulldozers rolled in and the burnt structures were carried to Dhapa. The big challenge was making the ground fit. “It was all slushy because of water sprinkled by fire tenders. Buddhababu would drop by twice a day — on the way to Writers’ Buildings in the morning and again on the way back. A temporary camp office was set up (on the fairground). There he would hold daily meetings with us,” Chatterjee said.

Bhattacharjee urged Ganguly, then in charge of solid waste management at the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, to deal with the slush. Ganguly sourced hundreds of lorries of sand. Work continued night and day.

The state government, at Bhattacharjee’s initiative, also extended financial assistance. “Our stalls were not insured. But the government compensated us for a significant part of the damaged books. That was a huge support for our morale,” Chatterjee said.

The fair had been inaugurated on a Wednesday; on Monday around 3pm, it caught fire; the next Sunday, the gates opened again, just as Bhattacharjee had promised.