The Sunday Haul

The Sunday before last Sunday I couldn’t visit Abids to look for books because of the rain. It was an agonizing week I spent waiting for Sunday which turned out to be a wonderful, sunny Sunday. The wait was worth it because I found four fantastic books.

The first find was ‘Seeing Things’ by Seamus Heaney. It had a beautiful cover and I got it for just fifty rupees. It is a book of poems and contains nearly forty poems. I was terribly glad I found this wonderful volume brought out by ‘Faber and Faber’ for so cheap. It has some priceless poetry inside. For those who don’t know Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

Another book I picked up along with Seeing Things at the same seller and at the same time and at the same price was ‘Dying Alone’ by Krishna Baldev Vaid. The book has a novella (Dying Alone) and ten short stories:- Silence, The Stone of a Jamun, The Voice Robber, My Effigy, The Sould of Darkness, the Fourth Window, The Thieves’ Thief, An Evensong, An Evening with Bhookh Kumari, and The Old Man in the Park. These are translated from Hindi by the author himself and I picked up this book since I have heard a lot about Krishna Baldev Vaid but hadn’t read any of his works. It would be interesting to read the original stories in Hindi if I am able to find them somewhere.

A few steps later I found another copy of China Mieville’s ‘Perdido Street Station’ in a heap of books selling for just twenty rupees. I had another copy with me that I had bought long back but this appeared to be a far better copy so I picked it up. However, I don’t know when I will get to read it since there are too many books waiting to be read.

Another book that I found not at Abids but at a seller near RTC crossroads was one I already have a copy of. It was ‘The Art of Living: Epictetus’ by Sharon Lebell that I got for fifty rupees. This is one wonderful book that teaches you so much about finding balance in your life and being calm at all times, in grief and in happiness which is something I am not able to do at all. It is at Abids I lose all sense of balance and proportion when I see all those books!