The Sunday Haul (on 14-05-2017)

There’s seems to be no end to my lucky streak finding good titles at Abids on Sunday mornings. Once again last Sunday I ended up with a good title in the haul. Though I found only good title it made me very glad coming across it unexpectedly. Actually, I found two titles and the second title was a cookbook which exactly doesn’t qualify as literature though it is no less entertaining. I found my third Adil Jussawalla title last Sunday at Abids. Coincidentally, I was going through the poems, one a day, in ‘Trying to Say Goodbye’ the collection I found very recently.

The first find at Abids last Sunday was ‘Dakshin Delights’ by Sanjeev Kapoor, the famous TV Chef who makes whipping up tasty dishes as easy as swallowing water. In the recent past I’ve found quite a few cookbooks by him and this was another good title that I picked up without a second thought because it was a hardcover and was in very good condition. I got it for only fifty rupees when the original price is two hundred and ninety five rupees.

After spending sometime in the café drinking tea alone and leafing through ‘Dakshin Delights’ I continued on the next leg of the usual circuit of the pavements of Abids. In one corner I spotted a book with a cover in beautiful dark blue and took it out to check the title and got a pleasant shock. It was a copy of ‘Maps for a Mortal Moon’ by Adil Jussawalla. I have been reading him since I was a teenager trying to be a poet.

‘Maps for a Mortal Moon’ (subtitled Essays and Entertainments) is edited by Jerry Pinto who wrote a wonderful introduction to Adil Jussawalla- his work, his persona, and a bit of his life. The present volume is a collection of Jussawalla’s poems, prose, articles and essays on sundry topics including essays on writers, writing, and reading which are three things that never fail to interest me. In fact there is a short essay on the pleasures of writing with pencils and fountain pens that was the first essay I read eagerly. I am eager to read the rest of the book that contains many, many interesting essays on diverse subjects. However, I do want to write more about this wonderful book in detail in a separate post that I want to do very soon. By the way, I got this book for just a hundred rupees which is a pittance compared to what is inside the book. Lucky me.