The Sunday Haul (on 30.06.2019)

Last Sunday the weather was such that I felt it was time to leave the cap at home while going out. It was a cloudy and windy day but it did not rain. I was glad that it did not rain or else I wouldn’t have been able to look around at the pavements at Abids for books to buy. However, I ended up buying three good titles in the couple of hours I spent at the Sunday book bazaar at Abids here in Hyderabad.

The first title was a book that I already have a copy of. I had bought a pretty old copy of The Seven Storey Mountain’ by Thomas Merton at the World Book Fair in New Delhi while I was there on work sometime in 2016. The copy I found at Abids was far better than the one I had bought in New Delhi. The cover was good and the binding was intact. One of the reasons why I hadn’t started to read it was its condition but now that I have a good enough copy I think one of these days I have to begin reading this much talked about book.

I’m always intrigued that there were so many Indian writers writing English fiction that I do not know. Whenever I see a book in English by an Indian writer I make it a point to buy it. Last Sunday at Abids I found another such title. I saw a copy of ‘First Light’ by Leena Dhingra that had an attractive cover and picked it up for a closer look. It wasn’t a hardcover though it looked like one. The book was bound in hardcover and the cover pasted on the front like they do in lending libraries. Inside I saw the stamp of ‘Ritana Books’ Defence Colony Flyover Market, New Delhi. On my previous visit to New Delhi I had visited a book store in Defence Colony that I read about online as one of the places for book lover to check out. It wasn’t ‘Ritana Books’ though. Anyway, the surprising thing about this book is that the seller asked for just ten rupees for it!

In the first week of the month I had found another copy of ‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison and this Sunday again I found another title by the same author. I saw a copy of ‘Paradise’ by Toni Morrison on a make-shift bookshelf at Abids. I bought it without hesitating, for sixty rupees.