Sometime in March this year when my brother-in-law told me that his daughter was getting married in May and that the reception was in Bengaluru I got pretty excited. Bengaluru was where I was dying to go again after having been there in February 2020 just before the lockdown. I was counting the days when I would be catching the train to Bengaluru. Last Saturday we set out for Bengaluru and the first thing I did after breakfast was to set out with my son for Church Street.
On the first day’s visit I decided to look in the three stores that Blossom had on Church Street. A friend in Bengaluru who I called told me about the third store that had been recently opened it seems. I had only a few hours to spend looking for books so I made the most of the time I had and managed to pick up eight titles.
Half of the eight titles were travel titles and the first one was ‘The Arabs’ by Peter Mansfield that was about the Arabs and strangely enough I have another book with the same title by David Lamb.
The second travel title was a nice copy ‘The Big Red Train Ride’ by Eric Newby that seemed to be about taking the train in Russia. I was glad I found this title.
The third travel title as a beautiful copy of ‘Best of Lonely Planet Travel Writing’ with some really wonderful travel essays by an assortment of well known travel writers.
My friend who lives in Bengaluru had told me that he had seen many Dervla Murphy titles in Blossom so it was the travel writing section that I checked out first because I was desperate to find ‘Full Tilt’ by Dervla Murphy. Instead I found ‘Wheels within Wheels’ by Dervla Murphy that I added to the. Haul.
I picked up the copy ‘God’s Snake’ by Irina Spanidou, a writer I never heard after reading the blurb by Doris Lessing on the cover. I hope it is as good as Doril Lessing says it is.
It is always a surprise to find a title by an author, an Indian at that, one had never heard. So when I saw a copy of ‘Seven Steps in the Sky’ by Kundanika Kapadia I was pleasantly shocked to find that it had won the Sahitya Akademi prize! in 1985. The original is in Gujarati and translated into English by Kunjbala and William Anthony. I loved the cover and look forward to read it soon.
A long time back I had read a review of ‘The Permanence of Grief’ by Nisha da Cunha and the reviewere had written that it makes for depressed reading which made me not to read the book though I hadn’t yet bought it or come across it anywhere. But the copy of ‘Old Cypress’ by Nisha da Cunha that I saw in Blossom didn’t look like it would make me sad so I bought it.
Finally, I found the copy of ‘RSS- The Long and The Short of it’ by Devanuru Mahadeva that I had wanted to read to know what it was all about. It is a short book of just ninety pages translated into English from Kannada.
We returned home with this haul and with a plan to come the next day for landing more titles.
The next day, 8th May, we were back on Church Street around ten in the morning. I decided to drop in at the other stores and so began with a visit to ‘Bookhive.’ The collection wasn’t much but just before leaving in a corner stacked behing other titles I found a copy of ‘The Blue Hammer’ by Ross MacDonald that I got for eighty rupees.
Next it was turn of ‘Book Home’ in the same place where ‘Bookworm’ used to be if I am not wrong. Anyway I had a pleasant shock when I found the title I was looking for. I found a nice copy of ‘Full Tilt’ by Dervla Murphy in Book Home and what made it pleasanter was that I got it for just a hundred and ten rupees.
Next I visited ‘Book Worm’ and also ‘Blossom’ and picked up five titles in these two stores but I cannot now remember which title I picked up in which store!
I found a nice copy of a title by an author whose book I picked up recently. It was a copy of
‘A Secret Country’ by John Pilger that was about Australia. Surprisingly the next book I came across was also about Australia- ‘The Ribbon and the Ragged Square- An Australian Journey’ by Linda Christmas
The other finds were a nice copy of ‘The Waiting Land’ by Dervla Murphy, ‘A Traveller’s Life’ by Eric Newby, and an interesting title Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass’ by Bruno Schulz about whom I had read somewhere very recently.
We returned to Hyderabad with a bag full of wonderful titles that also filled my heart with a strange joy at having landed some really terrific books.
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