The Sunday Haul

Summer is upon us if the rising temperatures are any indication. Last Sunday the temperature was in the high thirties, 35 degrees to be exact, which is not exactly something that would bring on sunstroke. But since I’d be out in the sun for a couple of hours in the morning on Sunday hunting for books at Abids, I packed in a cap and a bottle of water. It was a welcome Sunday coming at the end of a hectic week at work putting in 12-hour days. I was eagerly looking forward to my weekly book hunt at Abids.

On the way to Abids I stopped at Chikkadpally and found the first book of the haul. I saw ‘The Coming of Rain’ by Richard Marius and got it for twenty rupees. It was a Penguin title and seemed to be a novel with drought as the background, and which I planned to read after finishing P.Sainath’s ‘Everybody Loves a Good Drought’ that I am currently reading.

At Abids the second book of the haul was a book on VS Naipaul titled ‘The Humour and The Pity’, a collection of essays and articles on Naipaul and edited by Amitava Kumar. The book has a dozen essays and articles on the Nobel Laureate and his works by well known writers like Tarun T Tejpal, Pankaj Mishra, Amit Chaudhri, Farrukh Dhondy, J.M. Coetzee and other names that I haven’t heard before like like Akash Kapur, Shahid Amin, etc. I was really glad I got the book for only thirty bucks. I’ve already started reading it and I found Akash Kapur’s article on Naipaul titled ‘A Million Neuroses’ very interestingly written with a lot of insight and balance.

After reading some of the essays in this book I am tempted to buy particularly two titles ‘Half a Life’ and also ‘Finding the Centre’ and read them. I also want to read Naipaul’s other books that I haven’t read before and also Paul Theroux’s ‘Sir Vidia’s Shadow’ that lies on my book shelf unread since long. Another interesting thing about ‘The Humour and The Pity’ was finding a set of seven rules for writers that VS Naipaul listed out. If finding the book itself for thirty rupees only was something of a jackpot then finding Naipaul’s rules for writers was the bonus.