The Sunday Haul (0n 05-02-2023)

The trip to Abids last Sunday yielded a pretty good haul including a title I thought I missed buying earlier. Three of the titles were ones that I hadn’t read about anywhere. 

The moment I spotted this book I realized there was something special about it. When I picked up ‘A Dark Night’s Passing’ by Naoya Shiga drawn to it by its cover and opened the pages I knew I my first instinct that it was something special was confirmed when I read the blurbs. 

 

Though I had seen many copies of ‘Last Orders’ by Graham Swift on several occasions at Abids somehow I wasn’t very interested in buying the title. Last Sunday at Abids I saw a nice copy of ‘Learning to Swim and Other Stories’ by Graham Swift I knew I had to buy it if only for the reason that it was in a heap of books selling for twenty rupees only. 

About a couple of months ago I spotted a copy of ‘How Proust Can Change Your Life’ by Alain de Botton at Abids that I foolishly did not pick up. I had bought more than five books that Sunday and didn’t feel like buying another book with the seller who was a cantankerous fellow who quoted outrageous prices. But the next Sunday when I looked it wasn’t there making me feel like kicking myself for not having bought it the first time I saw it. Until last Sunday I looked for it every Sunday and then when I saw it last Sunday I felt very excited and grabbed it. 

    There are some books I feel irresistibly drawn towards though I or anybody else has heard about the author or the title. Sometime back I had found a book by a civil servant of yesteryears who had served in the court of a modern maharajah just before Independence in 1947. I had bought it intrigued by what I read in the few pages I randomly opened. Sometime afterwards I found another small and slim volume by an Indian diplomat in the early sixties or seventies that was once again a personal account of the times he had spent in various countries during his postings. Last Sunday at Abids I found another similar title that was also slim and small.  It was a copy of ‘Pawn in the Seventh House’ by R.G. Rajwade a civil servant in the house of Scindias who transformed into a diplomat after Independence. This slim volume published by Sangam Books, a division of Orient Longman and now no longer in existence is about the author’s time abroad in the service of the country. I was drawn to the font that was common to the books published in the sixties.