For the past several months I’ve been dreaming of traveling to Bengaluru and look in at the nearly half a dozen secondhand bookstores on Church Street, including the venerable Blossoms. I nearly went there in the first week of January when an opportunity came up to participate in a workshop but I had to drop the idea as I was busy with a course I was handling. However, last week I got the chance finally. My son was joining at his first job in a company in Bengaluru and on the pretext of accompanying him I too went. I spent a whole day trawling the bookstores and ended up buying nine wonderful titles.
I had a couple of hours free on Sunday evening so I went the new Blossoms on Church Street. All through the days leading up to the trip to Bengaluru I had been waiting for the moment I would step into this store. So when I entered I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of books available. It would take me a day to check out all the books so I tried to do a rapid scan as fast as I could. Sometime back, I forget where, I had read about Adam Diment, a name I heard for the first time. As is my habit I noted it down and also remembered it. So the first book I spotted at Blossoms was an old copy of ‘The Bang Bang Birds’ by Adam Diment. I felt ecstatic because I saw that the price was only seventy rupees. When I had checked online for books by Adam Diment after I heard about him, I was shocked to find the only book available was for something like 1800 rupees. So that explains the ecstasy.
I was even more ecstatic when I spotted a nice copy of ‘Imperium’ by Ryszard Kapuscinski next. I grabbed it, needless to say. This was one title I was looking around for since a long time. One get to find such great books at Blossoms that I have decided to make at least one trip every year to Bengaluru and buy all the books I want.
Finding the next book was enough justification to break my resolution of not buying more than two books as I felt there were simply too many books lying at home. I gave myself many excuses chief of which was that my birthday was just a couple of days away and I need to buy gifts for myself and there’s nothing better than a book to gift myself. So with that excuse I added the copy of ‘Patrick White Speaks’ by Patrick White, to my haul.
The next day, free of all chores, I decided to spend the whole day looking into the other bookstores on Church Street. I started off the day’s search with Select Book Shop. There I found a nice copy of ‘Time Bites’ by Doris Lessing. Since I couldn’t find anything else interesting I went upstairs where I met the venerable KK Murthy who told me to look around. So when I looked around I found a newish copy of ‘The Art of Travel’ by Alain de Botton. But it didn’t come cheap at 550 rupees.
After Select it was the turn of Bookworm. The person said they had a copy of ‘The War Doctor’ by David Nott that I read about somewhere. I took a break for lunch when they told me they would search for it. When I returned I was disappointed to learn that they did not have it. But I found another interesting title-‘An Anthology of Indo-English Poetry’ edited by Gauri Deshpande. There was no year of publication anywhere in the book so I am guessing it must have been published sometime in the early seventies.
There were poems by poets I knew and some I did not know about. The poets featured in it: Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, R.Parthasarathy, K.N. Daruwala, K.D. Katrak, Gauri Deshpande, Rakshat Puri, Gieve Patel, Adil Jussawala, Mamta Kalia, Saleem Peeradina, Jayanta Mahapatra, Pritish Nandy, and Pria Karunakar.
It was almost half past five and my train was at eight in the evening. I did not have much time and decided to look in Bookhive that I had not been on my earlier visit sometime in 2013. In Bookhive I ended up finding three wonderful titles. The first find was a nice copy of ‘Friend of My Youth’ by Alice Munro. It had the sort of plastic jacket that libraries put on the books and when I looked inside I was not surprised to read that it was a discarded copy from Leicester City Libraries.
These are the stories in ‘Friend of My Youth’- Friend of My Youth, Five Points, Meneseteun, Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass; Oranges and Apples; Pictures of the Ice; Goodness and Mercy; Oh, What Avails; Differently; and Wigtime.
I came to know about Jane Harper recently after I read about her ‘The Lost Man’ and ‘The Dry’ somewhere, naturally, online. I had noted down the titles and had no hopes of finding them in the near future. In Bookhive which was my next stop, I spotted a copy of ‘The Dry’ and was impressed by the blurbs and it also helped that the writer was an Australian so in it went into my haul.
The last find was the icing on the cake, a real treasure. I spotted a beautiful copy of ‘The Soccer War’ by Ryszard Kapuscinski. This was another title that I had been looking for. So with nine books in the haul and many more I wished I could buy I bade good bye to beautiful Bengaluru.
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