Two weeks without going to Abids on my Sunday hunt for books would be tough for me to take. The Sunday before I was down with fever and couldn’t go to Abids. Last Sunday because of the Ganesh procession though it looked like there wouldn’t be the weekly book bazaar I nevertheless went to Abids. I found not a single book seller and instead I found barricades, cops all over, and an air of festivity. Uma too had come down and we both tried to drown our disappointment in coffee at the Taj Mahal.
However, all was not lost. Actually, while coming to Abids I had stopped at Chikkadpally on the way. About five people sell books at Chikkadpally on Sundays and three of them have a pretty decent collection from where I have picked up some good books. One of my recent buys was VS Naipaul’s ‘A House for Mr Biswas’ sometime ago. But last Sunday at one such seller I picked up another good title- ‘The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories’ edited by Stephen Alter and Wimal Dissanayake. The collection had twenty short stories by some of the famous names in Indian writing like Ismat Chugtai, T. Sivasankara Pillai, Amrita Pritam, RK Narayan, Nirmal Verma, and a few others I’m not aware of like Chunilal Mehta, Avinash Dolas etc. I read Gangadhar Gadgil’s ‘The Dog that Ran in Circles’ in it. . I was damn glad I found the book. I got it for ninety rupees which is a bit steep. It made up for any disappointment at the lack of sellers at Abids.
Another book I saw at Chikkadpally was Bill Bryson’s ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ that was offered for hundred and fifty rupees but I did not bite. Maybe some other time I might pick it up if it is still around. There was a book of Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories translated by Rakshanda Jalil that I’d been eyeing for quite sometime now. I haven’t picked up because of the steep price.
JUST BOOKS
Later in the afternoon, having missed watching it in the evening on Saturday, I caught up with Just Books on NDTV Profit. The ‘What’s on My Bookshelf’ segment had Aatish Tasseer showing off his collection of books. The only book I had was VS Naipaul’s ‘A House for Mr Biswas’ and the rest were books I had not read. The other half of the episode featured Wajahat Habibullah on his book on Kashmir that he wrote. Just then there was a power cut and that was the end of Just Books for me.
THE BEST BOOKS SALE
Until I got a mail from Jai the other day that he had picked up quite a lot of books at the Best Books sale I wasn’t aware that the sale had started. Though I had written here on this blog that the sale was slated to begin from the tenth of September I completely forgot about it. Usually they put out an advertisement in the local papers but this time I did not come across any. Anyway, I have missed out on four days of the sale which means all the good books might have been snapped up by others smarter than me. I am going today and I hope I will find some books that I hope will blow away the cloud of disappointment that is hanging over me at this moment at not having been to Abids for two successive Sundays.
THE LITERARY REVIEW
The Sunday before there was the Literary Review in ‘The Hindu’ that I keenly look forward to reading. In it I read that the Literary Review is celebrating its twentieth anniversary. I am amazed that The Hindu has persisted with it for so long. It deserves a lot of praise for bringing out Literary Review regularly. Literary Review is something that people who love reading, books and literature will enjoy. I also read with great interest about the two Literary Conclaves (Lit For Life) at Delhi later this month and in October at Chennai where the winner of The Hindu Fiction Literary Prize for Best Fiction 2011 would be announced. I wish I could be at Chennai on October 29-30 for the event.
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