The Sunday Haul

Of the twelve days I was in Dehra Dun last month two happened to be Sundays. Of course, given the reason I was there I did not mind losing two Sundays at work. Sundays mean Abids and the book hunts for me but the five books I found at a sale in Dehra Dun kind of made it up for not being at Abids. However, once I was back in Hyderabad on a Tuesday I couldn’t wait for it to be Sunday.

Last Sunday, once in Abids I felt normalcy return to my life. It had been quite a different time in Dehra Dun and with all the running around here and there and living in a hotel room my normal life was a bit disrupted. Anyway, at Abids I picked up two books. The first find was a book I or anyone for that matter would have had second thoughts about reading. But after hearing all those tales of people dying horrific deaths in the floods in Uttarakhand I thought maybe the book I found would help me understand something I was unable to figure out. One of the tragic tales was the one a lady told me about waking up after two days of being lost in the mountains without food and water and finding her mother dead beside her. ‘On Death and Dying’ by Elisabeth Kubler Ross was the book I picked up last Sunday at Abids.

The other book I bought was one that would help me understand my work better. It was a copy of ‘The Monsoons’ by PK Das, which is an NBT book. There were other books I saw but I was not in a mood to buy them. I saw that Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ that I had seen earlier still with the same seller. Maybe next Sunday I will buy it if I do not find anything better.