The Sunday Haul

When I resolved not to visit Abids for a month or so in order not to add to the clutter of books at home I thought I would be able to hold on to this resolution. I stuck to this decision with great difficulty for exactly two weeks. Last Sunday I started to feel some kind of withdrawal symptoms. I missed being at Abids, missed looking at all the thousands of titles laid out on the pavements waiting for someone to pick them up, missed the usual Sunday banter with my friends at the cafe drinking chai. I missed it all. So last Sunday I decided to go but with a caveat that I would not pick up even a single book. However, it was not to be so because I bought three books, title that I couldn’t help buying.

Sometime back I had picked up a book on a hunch that was proved to be correct. After I read ‘The Tears of Autumn’ by Charles McCarry I felt like patting myself on the back for having picked up such a good book without knowing anything about the author or the title. So when I saw Dan Waddell’s ‘Blood Atonement’ on the pavement it did not take long for me to pick it up. That it was a Penguin title helped a bit but it was more my intuition that it would be an interesting read that made me pick it up.
The next find was another Penguin title, a King Penguin. I found a good copy of an old edition of RK Narayan’s classic ‘The Man Eater of Malgudi’ and got it for only thirty rupees. This was the first book I read in my life. I was maybe twelve years old when I found this book in my uncle’s bookshelf. I think I finished reading it in one day and since then I was hooked on books. Later I found all books of RK Narayan and read them one by one. I do not have a copy of ‘The Man Eater of Malgudi’ so finding this copy at Abids last Sunday was special.

The third title I found also was a Penguin title. On Sunday I came across a pretty decent copy of Dom Moraes’ autobiography ‘My Son’s Father’ that I got quite cheap. I paid only thirty rupees for it. I plan to read it one of these days. It is a perfect way to know more about Dom Moraes one of India’s famous poets/ journalists and a much honoured one at that.