The Sunday Haul

There is nothing better than carrying a collection of short stories to pass the time and also get some serious reading done. I made this discovery recently while in the waiting room of a doctor I had gone to consult for a minor problem. Maybe I will write about this ‘minor problem’ in a future post. Anyway, since I know I may have to wait for at least on hour for my turn I decided to carry along Annie Proulx’s ‘Close Range’ to read. I finished reading ‘A Pair of Spurs’ which was quite a lengthy short story before my turn came. Afterwards I realized that I have quite a number of collections of short stories of which Indian writers are too few, insignificant, in fact. I had only Anita Desai’s ‘Diamond Dust’ and Mridula Koshy’s ‘If It Is Sweet’ in my collection. After I went through all the short story collections on my bookshelves I noticed that those by women writers outnumbered those by men. I did not have a single book of short stories written by an Indian male writer which was something I told myself I would rectify at the earliest.

Last Sunday at Abids I finally got the opportunity. I saw MT Vasudevan Nair’s ‘Catching An Elephant and Other Stories,’ ,a collection of Malayalam short stories translated into English by V.Abdulla. ‘Catching An Elephant..’ has nine stories in all: Catching an Elephant, Red Earth, In Search of Shelter Once Again, Pathways of Withered Leaves, Bondage, The Enemy, The Sale, When the Doors of Heaven Open, and Kuttiedathi. I am glad I found this book at Abids and got it for only twenty rupees. This would be the first work of MT Vasudevan Nair that I would be reading though I’ve been read about him since quite a long. What fascinates me about him is that he is a screenwriter as well, something which not many writers can do successfully. The other book that I picked up at Abids last Sunday was Jeffrey Archer’s ‘Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less’ which I haven’t read so far. Archer isn’t exactly a writer I look forward to read but this was an original copy and not a pirated edition which is all that one finds if one wants to buy Archer’s books.

Last Sunday was the last hot Sunday of the summer. It was cloudy in the morning when we began the hunt for the books. Almost every week someone new is joining our small group of three intrepid book lovers. Last Sunday one more person tagged on and luckily found something worth buying. The surprise of Sunday was finding a translation of ‘Devdas’ that Shrikant had asked for just before we hit the pavements to look for the books. I had no idea that an English translation existed but when I spotted the book I was gladder than Shrikant for having found it. Surprises never cease at Abids.