The Sunday Haul

Due to a funeral that I had to attend the previous Sunday I couldn’t make it to Abids. However, last Sunday I was at Abids and felt like I had missed something. There I met someone who wanted to meet me after reading my blog. I gave him one of my several copies of Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ that I keep for these sorts of encounters. He had told me that he was looking for this particular title and I was glad I could give it to him. After a quick cup of chai and the preliminary talks with him and with Uma we set out to look for the treasures.

I got lucky once again and found another title by a writer I discovered recently completely by accident. I have come to like his style of writing very much and was looking forward to find his bestselling title. I found Charles McCarry’s ‘The Miernik Dossier’ with a seller near the GPO. I almost missed it but on a second look I found that is nondescript looking book was one I was looking for. I got it for only thirty rupees. Finding this book made my day at Abids. I did not find anything else afterwards but I did not mind it.

Actually on Friday I was somewhere near Sangeet and stopped at the make-shift second hand bookstore where in the past I had found a couple of good titles. I decided to take a look. There aren’t more than half a dozen shelves and it doesn’t too long to go through what’s on them. I saw Anita Desai’s ‘Where Shall We Go This Summer’ that I bought. It was a good copy and I got it for only thirty rupees. I bought it because I want to read what the women writers of India in the 1960s and 1970s wrote about. I had recently finished reading Kamala Markandaya’s ‘Nectar in a Sieve’ and Shashi Deshpande’s ‘That Long Silence’ that made me want to read more by such writers.