The Sunday Haul

At Abids last Sunday it felt like a mid-summer morning because it was unbearably hot even though it wasn’t yet noon. It felt like summer was already upon us and I have a feeling that this summer it is going to be very hot, hotter than what it was last summer. Last Sunday’s visit to Abids resulted in only one book in the haul. I found a book by someone who had left the IAS and written a book titled ‘Why I am Not a Civil Servant.’ It was by Ajay Singh Yadav who, I read in the book, had launched a political party and also contested the general elections. It sounded interesting because I have heard of other people who left the IAS and either joined politics (Jaya Prakash Narayan of Lok Satta) or joined the private sector.

On Monday, I dropped in at the Akshara bookstore in Jubilee Hills. It happens to be quite near to the place where I am working now in a different posting about which I plan to write in another post. The first thing that struck me as soon as I entered the store was the smell of books that I could never find in other stores. It made me feel at home and I spent about an hour checking out the stock in another room at the back where I had found some interesting titles on an earlier visit sometime last year. This time too there were a lot of books I wanted to buy but I ended up buying just one. I picked up a story collection titled ‘The Last Exit’ by Nirmal Verma, the acclaimed Hindi writer, for just fifty rupees.

A long time back I had watched an interview with Nirmal Verma on DD but unfortunately I had not paid much attention to what he said because at that time I was not as interested in knowing about writers as I am now. I only remember that he discussed about his stay in Czechoslovakia and the Sahitya Akademi award that he got for his book. The book I picked up ‘The Last Exit’ is an English translation of the same collection of stories in Hindi- Kavve aur Kaala Paani- that got it the Sahitya Akademi award. It has seven stories including ‘Crows of Deliverance’ that I remember seeing somewhere. But I am glad I found this book that I plan to begin reading right away.