The Odyssey Store

I go weak in the knees whenever I see new fountain pens and notebooks in stationery stores. I go to dreamland in which I am writing my best-selling novel with that beautiful Waterman fountain pen in that new notebook both of which I would have bought were my wallet been full of cash. This is exactly the situation I find myself in almost every time I visit a stationery store. It was no different yesterday at the Vikrampuri branch of Odyssey where I landed up in the evening.

I was disappointed to see that unlike their flagship store at Punjagutta, this branch did not have a café. This was a three-storey building with books, magazines and cosmetics at the ground level, gifts and kids’ books at the first floor with multimedia products and stationery items on the top floor. One thing I like about the Odyssey stores is the sales people greet you with a smile and ask if you need any help. They have branches in Imax, Punjagutta (the original store), Vikrampuri and now at the new International airport at Shamshabad according to a poster in the store.

I was looking to buy the latest issue of ‘Tinkle’ for my son but it hadn’t yet been stocked. I saw Paul Theroux’s ‘Blinding Light’ and also ‘Great Railway Bazar’ which I was secretly pleased to note was Rs 600 whereas I got the same book at Abids for twenty bucks sometime last month. I also saw Pico Iyer’s ‘The Lady and the Monk’, Jack Kerouac’s ‘Book of Blues’ and a lot of other books I would have loved to buy. For some strange reason Odyssey stores do not seem to stock ‘040’ magazine.

‘Eight thousand and eight hundred rupees’ the sales guy told me when I pointed out the 4GB iPod Nano securely locked in a display case. I had promised to buy myself one after completing the first draft of my book, but though a week has passed since I wrote the last page I haven’t picked up any of the three or four rewards I wanted to give myself. It looks like it is going to be a long time before I can save enough to buy the iPod.

One the way back I dropped in at the secondhand bookstore, ‘Al Classic’ inside Sangeet theater complex. I got a pleasant surprise when I chanced upon a book that was in my ‘Must buy’ list since more than a year. It is a book on writing and I will write about it in the next post. (I’m a writer, right? I’ve got to keep the readers coming for more…)