A Lucky Haul’

A couple of Sundays back having finished the browsing on the pavements at Abids I sauntered to the Best Books store down the road. I had found two titles outside on the pavement in front of the store there: a collection edited by John Pilger and a book on Africa that I bought. When I went inside the store to pay for them, I spotted the cover of a book I had read about much on social media but had not expected to find. It was the bright and attractive cover of ‘The Tale of Genji’ by Murasaki Shikibu. I took it out for a closer look and saw that it was a  translation by Royall Tyler and the copy was a Penguin Classics Deluxe edition. I did not want to buy it right away though I felt I had to buy it at any cost. I paid a small advance and told the seller to keep it aside and that I would come later and pay the rest before collecting the copy. 

Sometime last week I rushed to Best Books and collected the copy of ‘Tale of Genji’ that is thicker than a brick and seems to weight more than one kilo! I don’t know when I will get to read this tome running into almost 1200 pages. But I sure am very pleased I found this wonderful book. 

The Sunday Haul (on 15-06-2025)

 Yet another Sunday and yet another haul of five books at Abids. It is becoming harder for me to stop myself from buying books at Abids and also online where I seem to buying more books than at Abids. Last Sunday I was at Abids at my usual time around half past eleven in the morning. 

A few minutes after I reached the first haul was a copy of a book I already have on my bookshelf, and that I had found long back. The copy I saw last Sunday was a good one and since it was coming at only fifty rupees I decided to buy it and in it went into the haul. It was a copy of ‘The Jaguar Smile’ by Salman Rushdie that was a Picador title. 

Since I buy regularly from many of the sellers at Abids some of them stop me and ask me to take a look at some of the books they have kept in a sack. One of the sellers did just that last Sunday and the book I took out from the sack was a nice and almost new copy of ‘Falling off the Map’ by Pico Iyer. I think I have three or four copies of this book with different titles, and only last week I had bought a copy online just because I did not have a copy with that cover. So, I wasn’t exactly inclined to buy the copy from the sack I bought it anyway since I did not want to disappoint the seller. I got it for fifty rupees only. 

 

The next two finds were poetry titles. One was a copy of ‘Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets’ edited by R. Parthasarathy, a beautiful copy in very good condition. It is a collection of a couple of poems by some well-known Indian poets like Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Arun Kolatkar, Shiv K. Kumar, Jayanta Mahapatra, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, R. Parthasarathy, Gieve Patel, A.K. Ramanujam, and finally Keki.N. Daruwalla. 

Incidentally the next find was another collection of poetry- Under Orion by Keki N. Daruwalla that I got for only thirty rupees. I guess it is not so easily available and I felt glad I found it since I’ve been reading his poetry since I was in junior college. 

Mohan Rakesh is another Hindi writer I had been trying to find but I got nowhere in my search for his books in Hindi. Instead, last Sunday just under the copy of Keki N. Daruwalla’s ‘Under Orion’ was nestled the copy of ‘Another Life and Other Stories’ by Mohan Rakesh. It is a collection of these eleven stories translated into English: Another Life; A Living; Safety Pin; City Asleep; The Glass Tank; Married Women; Savourless Sins; The Man and the Wall; The Wound; The Stranger; and Animals and ‘Animals’.

The Sunday Haul (0n 08-06-2025)

 Last Sunday turned out to be another five-book haul day. I am getting a bit nervous at the number of books I am buying at Abids and also online this year. At the end of this month which will mark the end of half of the year I will try to count how many books I had bought in the first six months of the year. 

The first title I picked up on Sunday was at a seller in Chikkadpally. I found a copy of ‘The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists and the Stories That Shape the Political World’ by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman. It is about the American press and its coverage of politics there. I got it for a hundred rupees. 

Then the next title was at Abids finding a nice copy of ‘The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die’ by Niall Ferguson. I had been hearing the name of Niall Ferguson a lot and I wanted to see what this book was all about. I got it for fifty rupees from a friendly seller.

Since it was only twelve in the afternoon and too soon to go home, I ambled to the Best Book store down the road to look at the books they keep outside on Sundays. In a separate pile of books with different prices I was thrilled to read the name ‘John Pilger’ on the cover of a hardcover book. I like John Pilger’s journalism and have about four titles by him on my shelves. ‘Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs’ was a collection of twenty investigative stories by reporters like Martha Gellhorn, Wilfred Burchett, James Cameron, Paul Foot, Robert Fisk, Edward Said and others edited by John Pilger. I was thrilled to find a piece by Eduardo Galeano about whom I had read high praise somewhere and been looking for something by him since then. The price was steep at five hundred rupees but I decided to buy it anyway. 

In the same pile was a copy of ‘The Blackman’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State’ by Basil Davidson that too I decided to buy since I already have a copy of his ‘The Search for Africa: A History in the Making’ that I had bought at the Hyderabad Book Fair in December last year. This book was for two hundred and fifty rupees. 

While on the way to catch the bus home I decided to check the few books that an old person lays out on the pavement on the corner of the road towards Nampally. I immediately spotted a copy of ‘The Culture Industry’ by Theodor Adorno that I just grabbed. This is my first Adorno title about which I had read much on social media. I got this for seventy five rupees.

The Sunday Haul (on 01-06-2025)

There’s a break in the rains from the early monsoon so it was sunny but warm here in Hyderabad last Sunday. As usual I took off for Abids and first checked out the books at Chikkadpally. 

The first find was a copy of ‘The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India’ by Gyanendra Pandey nicely encased in plastic sleeve. It looked like an academic book but the topic was interesting so I picked it up for a hundred rupees. 

Next find was a book I had read about earlier somewhere and I was pretty excited when I found a nice copy of ‘Joothan: A Dalit’s Life’ by Omprakash Valmiki. It is another title on caste that I have on my shelves. Someday I plan to read them all one by one. 

Then I hopped on to a bus to Koti from where I got into a 218 and got down at GPO. I found a copy of ‘Malabar and the Portuguese’ by K.M. Panikkar that seemed interesting. Also, I had heard the name of K.M. Panikkar somewhere recently. The book was first published in 1929 and the copy I found was reprinted in 1997 by Voice of India, New Delhi. The font is an ancient type and gave an atmosphere of the 1920s. I got it for fifty rupees only.