After returning from Delhi with a haul of around dozen books I found that I had missed the book scene in Hyderabad so decided to drop in at the Lakdi-ka-pul branch of Best Books. It was a holiday because of the second Saturday and I had a bit of time to kill so I decided to do it at the book store. I thought I’d just take a look but as usual I took a look and also took a couple of books back with me.
There are few writers in Hyderabad and even fewer poets, so few that you can count their number on the fingers of one hand. This in a city of a couple of million. One such poet among us millions of ordinary people is Sridala Swami. My only complaint about her is that she’s written only two volumes of poems. I wish she would write more but the problem is you cannot force poetry out of anyone. It took me more than a decade to find her second collection titled ‘Escape Artist’ that I found last Saturday. There are more than forty finely crafted poems in four sections in this collection.
One writer I can never have enough is Arun Joshi. I have multiple copies of almost all his novels and I picked another beautiful copy of ‘The Strange Case of Billy Biswas’ at Best. The only Arun Joshi title I do not have is ‘The Survivor’ which is a collection of his short stories. I wonder how long I have to wait, and how many bookstores to search before I find this elusive title. Wish me luck, please.
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