The Weekend Haul

I hadn’t been to Abids the Sunday before due to things beyond my control. I was vaguely restless until it became too much to bear. I went to the Unique Books second-hand bookstore in Lakdikapul on Saturday. I am very much into crime fiction and so when I saw a copy of ‘Raffles’ E.W. Hornung I picked it up. Moreover it was a Penguin title, something I rarely let pass.

A long time back when I was a teenager I happened to watch ‘Apocalypse Now’ and later Oliver Stone’s ‘Platoon’ and gradually came to know the horror that was the Vietnam war. Then I read some books like ‘Despatches’ by Michael Herr, ‘The Things They Carried’ by Tim O’Brien, ‘In Pharaoh’s Army’ by Tobias Wolff most of which presented one side’s version of the war. Later I realized that there was nothing that revealed the story on the other side. In fact I was keen to find something that would show how the other side, the Vietnamese view so to say, felt about the senseless war that claimed thousands of lives on both sides. I was reconciled to the fact that I may not be able to get hold of such a thing if it existed. But at the Unique bookstore, wedged between two tomes was a narrow, slim volume that had nothing on the spine. I was curious and took the book out.

The book turned out to be ‘The Sorrow of War’ by Bao Ninh. There was a sepia photograph of a helmeted soldier’s and under the title at the top it said ‘The Award-winning Novel from North Vietnam. I opened it and inside I read that it was an English translation by Frank Palmos from the original Vietnamese by Vo Bang Thanh and Phan Thanh Hao with Katarina Pierce, and published by Secker & Warburg, London in 1993. On the back cover were details of Bao Ninh who was born in Hanoi in 1952 who was in the Vietnamese Army and one of the ten survivors out of a 500 strong brigade that was in the 1969 war. I also read that the novel was a huge bestseller in Vietnam.

The next day, a Sunday at Abids I found another crime title- ‘Death May Surprise Us’ by Ted Willis who is another writer new to me. It was a Pan title and appeared very interesting with a lot of praise in the blurbs from Evening Standard, Sunday Times, and Evening Standard. I took a risk and bought the title for thirty rupees only.

The other find at Abids was a copy of ‘Waiting for the Mahatma’ by RK Narayan that I had read ages ago. The reason I picked it up was the beautiful cover of the paper jacket. It was a 1971 reprint published by RK Narayan’s own publishing house- Indian Thought Publications, Mysore. It was in good condition except for the numbers scribbled on the cover of this book that was from the library of a Government Junior College in Hyderabad. I wonder how it got there on the pavements at Abids. I bought this for thirty rupees again.