The Sunday Haul (on 24-08-2025)

 The weather was beautiful in Hyderabad last Sunday with clear skies and bright sunshine when I set out a little early for Abids. As usual I stopped at Chikkadpally to check out the few sellers there. I had been seeing a hardcover copy of ‘In An Antique Land’ by Amitav Ghosh since more than a month that I hesitated to ask the seller about its price. I had thought he would ask me more than two hundred rupees but when he said ‘only eighty rupees’ I grabbed it.

At the last seller at Chikkadpally I saw a beautiful, almost new copy of ‘Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient’ by Edward W. Said, a title I already own. But this copy was too good to resist and also people ask me for copies of such titles so I bought it paying only hundred rupees for it. 

The first title I saw when I reached Abids was again another one I owned three copies of. I saw a beautiful copy of ‘The Old Patagonian Express’ by Paul Theroux, in a heap selling for fifty rupees only. Theroux is one of my favorite writers and I cannot resist buying all his travel titles so I bought this copy too for just fifty rupees. 

Afterwards I sat in the Star of India with a few new friends I had made at Abids thanks to another friend, Srinivas who is a regular at Abids. We talked for about an hour about Telugu literature and the titles they had bought at Abids just before we met. I can read Telugu but I take a long time to read in Telugu so I really don’t know if I should pick up one slim title. 

We all walked down to the Best Books store down the road and looked at the books outside the store on the pavement. There were books that were for sale at Rs. 100 for three titles. I spotted a copy of ‘Pilgrim’s Road’ by Bettina Selby, a name I had heard recently or one that I must have jotted down in one of my old notebooks. It was a travel title and there’s no way I am letting go of travel titles so I wanted to buy it. But I had to buy two more titles to go along with it. I found a copy of ‘Walking Erect with an Unfaltering Gaze: Myself when Young’ by Ambai, the Tamil writer. I was glad to have found it to be sort of autobiographical with the book being about her life until she is twenty-three years old. It is published by National Book Trust and probably aimed at young readers. But I was delighted to find it so added it and then looked for one more title to complete three titles.  

Again, I found another title that I already own- ‘Learning to Swim and Other Stories’ by Graham Swift, a slim collection of short stories. There are eleven stories in this collection, and when I read one of the stories, I realized that I hadn’t read the copy I had found long back.  

The best find of the day was a few minutes before I left. We were dispersing and they were taking leave of me when I was in a lane looking at the books a seller had when my eyes fell on a small book that looked out of place. I saw that it was a copy of ‘Defeat for Death’ by K.A. Abbas, and on the cover was the price Rs.2! I looked inside and saw that it was published in 1944 and realized that it could be a rare book and bought it for just thirty rupees.