The Sunday Haul

In Hyderabad May isn’t exactly the time of the year to be outdoors during the day. In May you can’t walk in the open for more than ten minutes without keeling over with sunstroke unless you are from Jubilee Hills in which case it takes less than three minutes however stylish your sunglasses might be. The temperature is in the mid-forties and one sweats buckets. Personally, I feel like jumping into a swimming pool and staying there until the end of summer. With temperatures like that you have to be either crazy or a banana vendor to venture outdoors especially in the afternoon. Unlike my previous field postings in this post at the Secretariat I usually do not get an opportunity to go out in the open. But on Sundays come what may I am at Abids. This Sunday I had particular reason to worry. I am still trying to overcome a bad cold and wondered if I’d be able to go to Abids and return on my own after spending more than two hours in the scorching sun. Luckily, it was a cloudy Sunday and the sun wasn’t to be seen in the morning. It was cool and pleasant. It got pleasanter later in the day at Abids when Jai appeared on the scene.


As soon as we gathered and after our mandatory chai we set out to look at the heaps of books. I did not find anything interesting anywhere for a long time. At the seller near the GPO there were the books I had seen last Sunday but somehow I did not buy the Nadeem Aslam titles. When we reached Bata Jai spotted me and moments later I found a Parker title- Stardust- that I did not then know I already had. The four of us headed towards an Irani and over a cup of chai chatted about books, fountain pens and everything people who love books and fountain pens talk about. I’d have spent some more time but Sunday happened to be my marriage anniversary (18th, btw) so I had to leave early. Of course, I did not go home straight but stopped at Chikkadpally for a few minutes. There I found a copy of Somerset Maugham’s ‘Of Human Bondage’ with a beautiful red cover. I got it for sixty rupees.


It has been nearly eight years since I’ve been to the Andamans and not a day passes without some memory of that wonderful place flashing through the mind. I always make it a point to read everything I come across that is related to the Andamans. Unfortunately, there isn’t much. During my stay in the Andamans I got to read a few pages of Madhusree Mukherjee’s wonderful book ‘The Land of Naked People’ before someone took it away. I never came across that book again but last Saturday on a visit to the Best Book branch at Lakdikapul I found another book on the Andamans. It was a small, slim volume tucked in a corner of a bookshelf, the sort of book I like to pick up. It was ‘Islands of the Marigold Sun’ by Suresh Vaidya and published by Orient Paperbacks. The original cover was missing and the present volume had a make-do cover. I picked it up because it was a travelogue and I had never read one on the Andamans. It had only a hundred eighty pages and looked very interesting so I took it.