The Sunday and Other Lockdown Hauls

Last Sunday, since the lockdown was relaxed for shops to open, I felt there could be a possibility of the second hand booksellers making an appearance at Abids after almost two months. But next day was Ramzan and most of these sellers would be preparing to celebrate it and besides the regular stores at Abids would be open for Ramzan shopping however little it may be. All these I felt would also mean that the booksellers would not be there at Abids.

So when I went to Abids on Sunday morning there was no one except two sellers. One was just setting up shop putting pirated copies of the latest bestsellers on a wooden shelf, and another near the Head Post Office with a handful of books for children and textbooks. I was disappointed but there was one hope. On the way to Abids I had noticed at a corner of the RTC X Roads junction the usual bookseller who has his second hand books there every Sunday. It was on the other side of the road and I thought I would take a look on the way back. So I rushed there with a desperation I hadn’t felt since a long time. There were a few novels and I thought I would pick up at least one book. I saw a nice copy of ‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy that was double the thickness of a brick that I picked up. Then I saw a copy of ‘If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him’ by Sheldon B. Kopp that I also picked up along with a copy of ‘Ithiyamala’ a collection of stories from Kerala published by CBT. I got all these three books for two hundred and fifty rupees.

Just before I left the seller told me he would get more books the next day since the store before which he kept his books would be closed on account of Ramzan. I decided I would drop in the next day too. So Monday morning I was out again in search of books but before stopping at RTC X Roads I decided to go up to Chikkadpally where I had seen someone selling tea before a hotel. It had been a long, long time since I had tasted tea in a hotel so I stopped there. Then on the way back I saw another seller at Chikkadpally who had a few books on the pavement. I found a nice copy of ‘Anywhere But Here’ by Mona Simpson that I decided to buy. However I did not find anything interesting with the seller at the RTC X Roads.

On Wednesday I had to go to my Institute in Jubilee Hills though we are closed due to the Lockdown until the end of the month. In the evening while returning I spotted a board that said ‘Book Sale’ near the MacDonalds outlet near the Jubilee Hills Police Station. I had crossed it by the time my mind registered it so I took a U turn and came back. Another board said each book was for Rs 100. I went in and looked around. There were a few titles worth buying but it was a beautiful copy of ‘A Month in the Country’ by JL Carr that I picked up. Only last week I had seen many tweets about this title so I bought it. It is just eighty five pages long so I managed to read it today in a couple of hours. It is a lovely book.

I am quite positive that next Sunday the second hand book sellers would be out in full strength at Abids. See you there if you are in Hyderabad.

A Pandemic Novel

Since a couple of years I have been drawn to titles by Indian writers originally in English and also those translated into English, especially those writers I haven’t heard about before and also little known names. I have novels by Uma Vasudev, Nergis Dalal, Mayah Balse, Leena Dhingra, Veena Nagpal and such writers not much discussed anywhere. To avoid taking a nap in the afternoon during the lockdown I am reading books by these writers most of which are around two hundred pages and therefore short enough to complete in a couple of hours.

But there is a novel that I am able, with great difficulty at that, to read only a few pages a day. It is ‘Trapped’ by Narendrapal Singh, originally in Punjabi. I had found it sometime last year I reckon and had bought it after seeing it with the same seller for a few months. I did not want to buy it for some reason other than the illustration on the cover. I thought I would be missing a great book so I bought it.

On the cover of’Trapped’ it says it has won the Sahitya Akademi award and also was banned in Punjab for obscenity. It won the Sahitya Akademi alright though I do not find anything in the novel deserving of that award. Then there’s no obscenity either. But what got me interested was that in the novel about a Punjabi guy trapped in the airport at New York while waiting for his American girl friend, there’s a pandemic that sweeps around the world at the same time. It is called ‘Hemi Parisec’ and though it was not fatal the symptoms were that the left side of the person was paralysed, the person experienced blackouts. But it caused enough alarm for the US and the USSR to get worried about it, especially the President of the US, and not surprisingly it is in India that the cure for it is found.

It is a bizarre cure, and two doctors in Ratlam in Madhya Pradesh discover it. Apparently, people in areas on either side of the Tropic of Cancer are not affected by it, and only such area in India is free of Hemi Parisec. It seems that the banyan trees are somehow related to the cure of this virus. The Swedish Academy hands out two Special Nobel Prizes for these two doctors! It is an outlandish story and I am yet to finish the novel.
More about it after I am done with the novel.

The Lockdown Reading

I had been dreaming of something like this, long days at home with nothing to do except read all the time. So ever since the Lockdown began I have done exactly what I dreamt of except that I did not read all the time. I spent a major part of the day reading, though and have managed to read more than twenty eight books so far from March 23. Here is the list divided into two categories: Books that took me more than a couple of days to finish, and books I read in half a day.

1. ‘Something for the Pain’ by Gerald Murnane
2. ‘Principles of Literary Criticism’ by IA Richards- Boring
3. ‘The Long Firm’ by Jake Arnott
4. ‘Nine Faces of Kenya’ by Elspeth Huxley
5. ‘Our Kind of Traitor’ by John Le Carre
6. ‘The Dirty Life’ by Kristin Kimball
7. ‘Dear Life’ by Alice Munro
8. ‘The Secret Lovers’ by Charles McCarry
9. ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ by David Foster Wallace
10. ‘Break, Blow, , Burn’ by Camilla Paglia
11. ‘Under the Dragon’ by Rory Maclean
12. ‘Everywhere I Look’ by Helen Garner
13. ‘The Old Forest and Other Stories’ by Peter Taylor
14. ‘And Why Not’ by Barry Norman
15. ‘Pyada’ by Surendra Mohan Pathan (Hindi)
16. ‘The Plains’ by Gerald Murnane

The Half Day Reads:
Since they were not more than two hundred pages I would sit down after lunch and finish these books before I went to sleep. I got the idea half way through or I would have read only those books I could finish in half a day from the beginning of the Lockdown.

1. ‘Sunday at the Pool in Kigali’ by Gil Courtemanche
2. ‘The Mystic Masseur’ by V.S. Naipaul
3. ‘This Side of Paradise’ by Scott F. Fitzgerald
4. ‘The Root of His Evil’ by James.M. Cain
5. ‘The Search Warrant’ by Patrick Modiano
6. ‘A Man, A Home, and A World’ by Jayakanthan S
7. ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark
8. ‘Bullitt’ by Robert L. Pike
9. ‘Yakshi’ by Malayatoor Ramakrishnan
10. ‘The Bang Bang Birds’ by Adam Diment
11. ‘Tim’ by Colleen McCullough
12. ‘Samskara’ by U.R. Ananthamurthy

Still Reading
1. ‘Of Human Bondage’ by Somerset Maugham
2. ‘Trapped’ by Narendrapal Singh
3. ‘So Many Books So Little Time’ by Sara Nelson

I am glad I got read so many books. I enjoyed reading all these books except ‘Principles of Literary Criticism’ which was a tough read, and ‘Trapped’ by Narendrapal Singh that I have yet to finish is one of the most stupid books I’ve ever read, and I don’t know why I want to read it until the end. I reckon I will read another half a dozen books before the Lockdown ends here.

The One and Only Dave Barry

There are humour writers and then there’s Dave Barry. He is perhaps the only humour writer who won the Pulitzer Prize. Personally I rate him as the funniest writer in the world whose articles make me almost roll on the floor laughing. Discovering Dave Barry’s columns was one of the luckiest things in my life.

I first discovered Dave Barry’s writings in ‘The Asian Age’ newspaper that carried his columns in its Sunday editions. I used to eagerly look forward to buy the Sunday’s Asian Age that in those days used to reach Hyderabad the next day. His goofy humour appealed to me and I was glad to learn that there was someone who could write what would appear to others as silly humour. I used to laugh uncontrollably and still do whenever I read his articles. It is another thing that there are very few things that can make me laugh in that manner.

I did not realize Dave Barry also wrote books until I accidentally found a copy of ‘Dave Barry Does Japan’ in the Gangarams store in Hyderabad. It was in a discount shelf that I chanced upon this wonderful and extremely funny book. I was so happy to find it that I began to search for his other titles that were listed inside the book. Not very long after that I found a hard cover copy of ‘Dave Barry Turns 40’. Over the years I have bought more than a dozen copies of this title and also other Dave Barry titles. Another Dave Barry that I have multiple copies was ‘Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits’ and as the title says it has some of Dave Barry’s funniest pieces.

Along the way I found ‘Dave Barry is Not Making This Up’ and also ‘Dave Barry is Not Taking This Sitting Down’ and his other titles. I was the happiest when I found a nice copy of ‘Dave Barry’s Guide to Guys’ and later a beautiful hardcover copy of ‘Dave Barry’s Guide to Life’. I am finding it difficult to say how incredibly funny Dave Barry is. Others may find his humour to be juvenile but I think his humour is in a different class in itself.

Unable to bear the tension of waiting for his new title to turn up in the bookstores here and one would never find copies of Dave Barry titles in any store since I used to find them second hand on the pavements or the second hand book stores. I asked a relative in the US who was visiting to get me a copy of ‘Boogers are My Beat’ and my brother who also stays in the US brought ‘Dave Barry’s Money Secrets’. I have found almost all books written by Dave Barry except a couple like ‘Claw Your Way to the Top’ and another title I am not able to recollect now.
So far I have managed to find almost two dozen of his titles. It is interesting that he also wrote two novels one of which was ‘Big Trouble’ that I did not particularly like. But I love all his other books that I think are some of the best cures for bad moods.