The Midweek Haul

After more than two decades of experience looking for books in Abids I learnt a few things about the second hand book market that comes up here every Sunday. One such thing is the knowledge that if the day of the final Ganesh procession happens to fall on a Sunday then the book market doesn’t come up as the sellers cannot make it back home on account of the traffic restrictions. The Sunday before last happened to be the day of the Ganesh procession so I decided to skip the weekly visit to the book market at Abids.

But on Thursday, three days before Sunday I was in the vicinity of Akshara Book store in Jubilee Hills. It is a three room store and adjacent to the main room of Akshara is another smaller room. On the shelves in this room one can find copies of books that look old and that come for discounted prices. On my earlier visits I had found a few good titles cheap. I had last been to Akshara almost a year ago but hadn’t found any good title. But last Thursday I was lucky to find three good titles.

There are only a couple of titles missing in my collection of VS Naipaul books and one such title I haven’t been able to find was ‘A Turn in the South’ by VS Naipaul. I spotted this title on an upper shelf at Akshara and picked it up along with two titles by Manoj Das- ‘Tiger at Twilight,’ a novel and ‘Farewell to a Ghost’ which is a collection of twenty three short stories by Manoj Das. I have yet another title- ‘The Collected Fiction of Manoj Das’ that I have yet to read.

I got these three titles for a hundred and seventy five rupees, with the ‘A Turn in the South’ costing me a hundred rupees and seventy five rupees for the two other titles. It is a fair enough price I feel.