FRIDAY DOUBLE POST-2: The Sunday Haul

When the festival season begins it is bad news for the second hand book sellers at Abids in Hyderabad. Starting from the week before Dasara and upto end of Diwali all shops at Abids are open even on Sundays. It is on Sundays that the second hand booksellers of sell books on the pavements of Abids. Abids being a prime shopping center otherwise, the shops are open on Sundays. Last Sunday however only a couple of the regular shops were open which meant that the second hand book sellers were present in full strength. We (me, Uma and Srikant) started off with the hunt after our usual tea and biscuits at the Irani, at around half past eleven. The beautiful, mildly sunny morning appeared promising.

Shortly after we began looking I found Doris Lessing’s ‘Particularly Cats’ that I had seen a couple of Sundays ago. In this month’s ‘Literary Review’ of The Hindu, in his ‘Endpaper’ column, Pradeep Sebastian had written about Nilanjana Roy’s ‘The Wildings’ in which cats feature prominently. I somehow felt that maybe I should read both these books and so picked up ‘Particularly Cats’ that was in a pile of books being sold for twenty rupees. ‘Particularly Cats’ is just over a hundred pages and has fourteen chapters. The way the writing goes (lucid) the book can be finished in a couple of hours. I want to read ‘Particularly Cats’ and ‘The Wildings’ simultaneously if I can. But I have no idea when I would be able to buy ‘The Wildings’ and read it but I’ll be looking for the book first at Abids. If I do not get it here then I plan to buy a new copy very soon.

For some reason I am unable to fathom, I am utterly fascinated with books on food, cooking, chef’s autobiographies and related stuff. I have read Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Kitchen Confidential’, ‘Nasty Bits’, and also a book by Gordon Ramsay recently. There is a book by Michael Ruhlman titled ‘The Soul of a Chef’ that I have bought a long time back and haven’t yet found enough time to read. Sometime back I had seen ‘Best Food Writing 2007’ at Abids but did not buy it because the price quoted by the seller was too high. I had a feeling that no one would buy the book and I was right. Three or four months have passed and the book was still with the pavement until last Sunday when I got the book for half of what the seller had quoted originally. Edited by Holly Hughes the more than fifty articles in ‘Best Food Writing 2007’ are put in nine sections with the following titles; Food Fights, Home Cooking, Someone’s in the Kitchen, Dining Around, Fast Food, The World’s Kitchen, The Meat of the Matter, Personal Tastes and Why I Cook. The last chapter is where I want to start reading the book. The articles are culled from several magazines and of the fifty odd names of the writers the only names I could recognize were that of Madhur Jaffrey, Barbara Kingsolver and Anthony Bourdain. Since I rather like Bourdain’s style of writing I read his article titled ‘My Miami’ on a few food joints in Miami where he has some really exotic stuff. You can’t have a book like ‘Best Food Writing’ and not find any recipes in it. Recipes abound in it though of dishes I’ve never heard of before and which I’m not likely to find anywhere in Hyderabad except maybe in Jubilee Hills. I’m not listing them here deliberately lest it leaves one salivating. On the way back I stopped at a seller who puts up a few books at RTC X Roads just beyond the traffic signal on the side of the road leading towards Musheerabad. I haven’t picked up many books here but last Sunday I saw a title that I had a feeling might be a good read. One reason I wanted to buy this was my resolve to read as much fiction by Indian writers as possible and the other reason was that it was a title by Penguin. I got ‘Sweet Chillies’ by Balraj Khanna for forty rupees. I am very glad I bought it because I’ve another good writer that I’ve discovered on my own. Later I read that ‘Sweet Chillies’ was a sort of a sequel to ‘A Nation of Fools’, Balraj Khanna’s first book. I vaguely remembered seeing this title somewhere recently but now I plan to look for it and read it before beginning ‘Sweet Chillies.’ I really want to find ‘A Nation of Fools’ because it seems it was compared with ‘JD Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’ by someone.