Amitav Ghosh and an admirer...

There are some things that I am not confident of writing about, though they are very close to me, almost like vital parts of whatever is my intellectual make up... though I have written two posts on Amitav Ghosh, these are mostly external to his works...I enjoy Amitav-da's novels tremendously and derive great joy and satisfaction after reading them...I have my favourites and at present they are In an Antique Land, The Calcutta Chromosome, and Dancing in Cambodia, At large in Burma...and Sea of Poppies will soon join this list...there are various reasons why these books have become my favourites...I have read his other novels and liked them and enjoyed them immensely...there is this reverence that I have for Amitav-da as a writer, which I slowly discovered growing in me over the past 10 years...I don't know why...He is great story teller...no doubt about it...and even before I had seen him for the first time and heard him speak, I somehow felt that Amitav-da was a very soft-spoken person and a powerful and dedicated writer...his writings has a very different quality...and, even though at some point of time I felt that I should maybe write a paper on one of his novels, I could not bring myself to even start work on this little project... therefore, meeting him and hearing him talk was a big experience for me... especially this time, I wouldn't have made it if my cousin Shubha (Chennai) hadn't come forward to help Shruti, when Shruti was frantically hunting for passes... I feel happy when my family and friends indulge me, but it is also a tremendous feeling of responsibility...

I can share my reading experiences of Amitav Ghosh's novels with you, I can talk about his novels...things that I liked... but I will never be able to write about his novels...maybe I am a mad fan ... but, as long as there is a method...I am ok with it...

An evening with Amitav Ghosh

Hi...

Yesterday, June 24,2008, was a wonderful day...I met or rather saw my literary idol Amitav Ghosh...heard him speak and read out from his latest novel Sea of Poppies... this was the second straight time that I was attending a 'reading' by Amitav-da... the first time I heard and saw him was when he had come to Hyderabad for the launch of The Hungry Tide...I must thank Shruti profusely for running around and trying and succeeding to arrange an invite for the event...She was really furious at me for making her run around, when Vinod told us that invitations are not required as the organisers had announced the event and venue in the papers...and that he just walked in...

I don't have to tell that I was very happy...and even mustered enough courage to stand up and make an observation about the bhojpuri songs that Amitav-da had included in his novel...and also about my experience of reading the novel with the missing pages...I also videographed a small portion where Amitav-da is reading from Sea of Poppies...I will treasure this video...

I must thank Shruti, without whose efforts and support, I would not have made it to the reading yesterday evening...she also patiently took photographs when I went up to Amitav-da to get my copy of the novel autographed...

Thanks to ITC Hotels Kakatiya for arranging this beautiful book-reading evening in the sparkling Hyder Mahal hall and thanks to Penguin for bringing out a good looking book and for their excellent production values...

Going totally bonkers...A Fountain Pen Dream!

It was absolutely crazy and bizarre… it was Saturday, 19th July, the college was closed due to a bandh called by a political party (we work 6 days a week)…I was at home…though Shruti works only 5 days a week, she had some work at EFLU…I completed some pending jobs in the morning and finished my lunch…I thought I’d take a nap…I had fallen asleep and sometime after that the power would have gone off, as it usually does these days in Hyderabad…I must have been really tired not to have woken up immediately, because the minute the ceiling fan stops moving, I start sweating immediately…it must have been after the power cut that I had this dream…

I was in this place, which was vaguely familiar…can’t place it…sort of a compound with old houses, patchy moist walls, overgrown plants and so on…and one of my teachers (where she came from, I don’t know!!!), who is also a friend now, asks me to help her in discussing something with her students…for this we had to go from this place I described to another place…I went in a car and the driver was Anthony, the driver of one of the professors in our college (how Anthony came in to all this is something I don’t understand…)…so, Anthony drives me to this place, which is totally unfamiliar, which is a nice enough kind of a building…I get down and proceed towards the building when I see this rather shed like structure with earthen floor and thatch like roof…this structure had a door like opening over which hung a kind of banner or board announcing the name of a stationery/book shop…I forgot all about my teacher-friend and went inside…

As I entered, I saw that the shop was to the right…an open kind of shop, which had stuff arranged in wooden steps on a platform kind of structure at a height of some 5 to 6 feet from the floor…there was this person sitting there…I asked him if he sold fountain pens…he said ‘yes,’ and showed me a fountain pen made entirely of wood, not ebonite…I have never seen anything like this before…it was sort of flat looking…had a flat but ‘bulged in the middle’ kind of barrel, and a similar flattish section…it had a nib, but the pen did not have a cap…I asked him the cost, and he said, ‘six’…and then added, ‘for 10 more rupees, I will fix a better nib’… so I presumed the cost to be ‘sixty’ rupees…and asked him to fix the better nib… the entire shop looked like a pen workshop…he then took out a box and hunted around for the ‘better’ nib…this much is still clear…then, things appeared vague for some time…

Sometime during this, I reminded myself that I had sauntered in to this place and that I had actually to go and meet my teacher/friend…as I was thinking about this, and slowly started walking out, with an intention of informing them of my whereabouts and coming back, I saw that my friend had come out to see where I was and saw that I was coming out of this pen shop…and she smiled, saying, ‘haan…it had to be a pen shop, that’s what was keeping you, are you coming in or not?’ I remember making a silly face and sort of said that I’ll be there with all of you soon and went back in…and what I remember is this person giving me this wooden pen with a nib fixed and of all things, a ‘lantern’ attached to the nether part of the barrel …I was kind of taken aback…it was not a battery operated torch, but a proper kerosene or spirit ‘lantern’ with a wick and glass cover and a bottle like thing to hold kerosene/spirit…and it was sort of fixed…a lantern usually swings from its handle, but this lantern didn’t swing from the bottom of the pen…it was not a big lantern, but it was longer than the pen…around 8-9 inches…the entire thing measured around 15 inches…slightly longer than a foot-ruler…he gave me this ‘pen’… I didn’t know what to do with this…how am I going to use this, I thought? I asked him the price and he said, ‘1,500 Rupees’…from 60 to 1500 was a big jump…I was hesitant…

And then I remember asking him if he had any ‘Wilson’ fountain pens…he then asked a young chap to look after my request…this young man then came and sat cross legged (I don’t know where he came from…I didn’t seem to notice him before) at the counter-like structure and pulled out a wooden tray kind of thing, which had a lot of compartments…each compartment contained a different part of a fountain pen…some familiar and some totally unfamiliar like thin light blue plastic-like rectangular pieces…I was intrigued …and this young man proceeded to put things together from this tray to make this pen… I have never seen anything like this…he looked like a jewellery shop worker… I asked him something, I don’t remember what, and this man looked up…to my surprise, I saw that this was no longer a young man, but a man clearly above 50 years of age…when this replacement occurred, I can’t say…I don’t remember what I had asked him, but what he said must have been in response to my query…this elderly person asked me not to buy that particular brand…because that is not good…or something to that effect…by that time, the pen I had asked for was ready…I hadn’t realised that a pen could be made like this…assembled in front of your eyes…like pizza with your choice of toppings…I asked the price of this pen, and he said 1,000 rupees… again, I was taken aback…a thousand rupees for an ordinary pen!…but I wanted to buy that pen…

Somewhere around this time, I must have woken up…and I could recall some parts vividly…I haven’t dreamt of fountain pens before…must have been an overdose of fountain pen related talk and discussions with Hari and shopping in Gaya and Hyderabad, all those photos and posts here and at FPN…must have taken its toll… when I realised what had happened, I sent an SMS to Hari telling him that I had gone totally bonkers and related in a few words what I had seen in my dream…Hari is understanding in these matters and sent a reply soon enough, saying with written laughter that I was now totally assimilated…

I might have taken some liberties with the sequence of events, but I have tried very hard to retain in memory whatever I had seen in the dream by going through the whole sequence every day till today…But, that image of the ‘lantern pen’ will remain for a long time…I wish I could draw well, I would have sketched a rough drawing of this great multipurpose pen…!!!

Discovering some vintage Indian fountain pens in Gaya, Bihar

Plato 14 kt gold nib pen



Indian Waterman Cap and Body engraving



Indian Pilot Capped

Dear friends…

This time around, I am writing about some FP discoveries that I made in the pilgrim town of Gaya in Bihar, India…Gaya is Shruti’s hometown and I was visiting her parents and I was there for a week…ok, before going there, FP buff that I have become now, I was wondering whether there would be some shop in this town that would have some FPs…I wrote to my good friend (and fellow FPN-ian) Hari, informing him that I would be going to Gaya and that I’d be on the lookout for FPs there…promptly, in his next mail, he sent me the address of a pen shop in Gaya…

It was with a great deal of scepticism that I went to this shop, Sainani Pen Corner, on the third day of my stay in Gaya…I imagined it to be a big shop, bustling with customers, and would have undergone changes and would now be selling Indian Parker Vector FPs and left over Camlin FPs, the ubiquitous FP brands that one commonly finds in Indian stationery shops… if I was not on the lookout out of the car window, I would have missed it, the look of the shop turned out be an anticlimax…it was slightly more than a hole in the wall…what could I find here?

Anyway, Shruti and I went to the small counter and there was this man (Anjani Kumar Sainani)…I asked him whether he had any fountain pens…he gave me a recent model called Montex…I asked whether he had any ebonite old FPs…I think, that cooked my goose…he realised he had a mad FP fan…he said that he used to have such pens in the past and maybe one or two are still left over and that he’d have to search…the shop was stacked till the roof with old dusty cardboard pen boxes…he then proceeded to show me some really old Indian steel nibbed FPs…names like Kingson, Olympic, Wilson … I had heard of Wilson, who used to manufacture FPs in India with their HQ in Bombay…I asked him the prices of these pens and he told me that the price list is with his brother and that he’d let me know…and all these were steel nibbed ones…he told me he also has Swans and Waterman and Pilot gold nib pens…and that he’d have them in the shop in a couple of days…and asked me to come back two days later…and then he showed me a brand called Plato…with 14 kt gold nib…it was really good looking, red in colour with a broad band on the cap…vintage… almost 40 years old…and the price he quoted was too much…I didn’t have the heart to buy the pen, though good looking, at that price…that day, I could buy only a Kingson FP, as that was the only FP that he was able to quote any price…in the evening, I called up Hari and told him about my visit and the pens that I saw and the prices that were quoted…my heart was really after the Plato G-Nib pen…Hari told me that the Wilson steel nibs were ok, but the price for the Plato was way beyond even the most inflated rates that anyone would quote…and Hari also requested me to buy spare specimens (if available) of any pens that I bought or saw…and Hari, ever practical, also asked me photograph the Plato gold nib pen, even if I didn’t want to purchase it…this was real good advice…with Hari’s various advices in mind, I went there two days later, with hope in my heart and a reasonable amount of money in my wallet…

I had kept aside a couple of Wilson and Olympic FPs earlier, and when he saw me, he took them out and told me the price…I was stunned…it was too much…he then showed me Swan (Cambridge) steel nib FPs and an ebonite Wilson…and a mottled orange flat top/bottom Wilson (this looks like ebonite, but I am not sure), also steel nib…I was sorely tempted…but the price he was quoting for these steel nibbed FPs was too much…once an FP addict, always an FP addict…with a heavy heart, I started selecting the proffered pens…he had two mottled orange and two zany designed Wilsons…I took them all…he had two Swan Cambridges…I took them too…and the Wilson mottled brown ebonite, he had only one…I took that…so, I had purchased 8 pens, along with the Kingson, two days back…I mentally counted the money I had and decided that I couldn’t afford the Olympic FPs…then I remembered Hari’s advice on photographing the G-Nib pens, and I asked him to show me the Plato…and wonder of wonders…apart from Plato, he proceeded to display some more G-Nib pens…an Indian Pilot GN, an Indian Waterman, and another Plato GN with piston pump filler…I was stunned…I have posted the photo of the shop and I think you can understand my reaction on seeing these pens…but the price that he quoted for each of these was astronomical…he was not willing to even reduce 1 rupee…therefore, buying them was out of question…so, following Hari’s advice, I managed to photograph them in their various poses…and have posted them here…

But the bigger and important point is that at one point in time in the 1960s, international pen makers like Pilot and Waterman and Swan had set up shop in India and were manufacturing these pens in India…and they were manufacturing machine made gold nibs here in India… and many old timers have said that they were using these pens, albeit steel nibbed ones, in their school and early college days…it also speaks a lot that an obscure shop in an out of the way town like Gaya has old stocks of these pens…and as Hari said, during one of our ‘pen-cussions,’ the Sainani Pen Corner must have had its glory days…but, all that is history now…these pens are no longer manufactured here and all that we have are some left over FPs and these photos…

I thank Hari wholeheartedly…as you can see, he has been with this episode right from the start…giving me the name of this pen shop to offering various suggestions during the purchase and discovery of these pens, and finally for uploading all these photographs, so that I could post them…you can see all these photos at www.fountainpennetwork.com in the pen photography forum…

This post is written and photos are posted, more with a sense of history than anything else…a kind of glorious chapter in the history of Fountain Pens in India…

I hope this entire narrative was not too tedious for your reading pleasure…

Thanks…

Jayasrinivasa Rao

Musings on turning 40

Hello friends…

I touched forty yesterday…a momentous occasion in anybody’s life…(from where does anybody come in, haen?…it is I who has touched 40…so it should be a momentous occasion in my life)…ok…ok…let’s not quarrel…you see, I am having a concurrent conversation with myself…actually, on this momentous occasion (second time…), as I started reflecting (when did you become a mirror…?) on the decades that I have spent on this blessed earth…I realised one thing…nothing has changed… (wow…) anyway, on this momentous occasion, (come on…this is too much, you should use such clichés only occasionally…) as I woke up, I started to worry…(haen…!!!) I haven’t started greying yet!!! (super…) This is terrible, yaar!!! …I especially wanted to start greying at the temples…then I again reflected (you should have mirrored…), since I am not much of a temple-goer, it is not likely to happen anytime soon…so be it…maybe, I should start going to churches… I am not very much into religion and all that stuff…maybe, that is the problem…maybe, it helps one grey…all the same, I feel fit and fine…I can hear my two baby chins sometimes having a chinwag…wagering, actually (on???) …apart from this, things seem to be ok with me…the left knee is trying to act smart…these days, it has started to protest…(very smart) it smarts sometimes…but I don’t bother about such knee-jerk reactions…I wear smarty pants, you see…but I need my left knee…(eh…!! You kneed your left knee? With your right?)…gives a sort of balance, you know…left and the right… help me stand and walk (right…well said, dude)…and of course, I have to have many farewell ceremonies…the lush black hairs on my crown constantly wave me good bye and disappear…strand by strand…but I am an eternal optimist…the hairline recedes and I gain more face…less shampoo… see, I told you…there’s faayda in everything…look at the bright side, maan…I am actually totally fit and fine…looking forward to many more such momentous occasions (you couldn’t resist, na, just to irritate me…)

Here I come (bad word…) ok…ok…arrive…fiery forties…look out…

The Long Locked Hamlet - a parody

Hello folks...

I think I have a tolerably good sense of humour…ha ha ha…(see…I told you!!!) …at some point of time in the past, I thought I should seriously pursue humour (huh?) …so, I thought, I’d write humour-laced stuff …my first attempt at writing, as it turned out, was combined with acting it out…I had joined CIEFL in 1992…and there was this Participants’ Day and I thought I’d participate in the entertainment programme…if you observe carefully, there was a lot of thinking going on at that time…mind it…if I have to go on stage, I had to either act or sing or tell(?) jokes…I thought I’d do some acting…and write my own script for that…at that time Prof. Balasubramanian used to teach Phonetics…it was a new subject for me and I liked it and Prof. Bala’s enthusiasm in teaching it…I liked the way he would speak in various English accents…and for some reason the way he pronounced the word ‘cut’ struck me…I had grown my hair long at that time, not very long though…and I liked Hamlet…somehow, all these came together and I wrote a parody of ‘To be or not to be’ and enacted it on stage…Prof Bala was sitting in the first row and in the next class he said, so, you parodied me too…or some such thing to that effect…then this parody was also published in the CIEFL participants’ newsletter… people liked it…I have a photo of that brief performance…but too many microphone stands have covered my princely stature and clouded my royal visage…so no photo…only the parody…my first attempt at comedy…if comedy is the stuff of laughter please read on…(I am trying to write Shakespearean!!)

The Long Locked Hamlet
[with profound apologies to the bal/rd]

To cut or not to cut
that is the question.
Whether it is manly in this world
to suffer the itchings and scratchings
of long hair or to take arms against and by
cutting…end them.
To cut, to shave – No more –
and by a tonsure to say we end
the tortures and a million natural
locks that head is heir to.
‘Tis a deliverance devoutly to be wished
To cut, to shave – to shave –
perchance to bleed; ayyo, there’s the nick.
There it is suspect, that makes
a nuisance of so long hair.
For who would bear the itchings and
scratchings of lice, mice and dandruff ?
The owner’s envy and the neighbour’s pride.
The locks of untended growth,
the love’s delay.
When I myself might pare it with a
bare pare of scissors.
Who would fardels bear,
To sweat and stink under such heavy
locks?
But the dread of identity after tonsure.
Thus locks make idiots of us all.
And thus the natural hue of hair is
covered over with a horrible
layer of dandruff.
– Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! – Nymph, in Thy
prayers be all my locks remembered.
Take me to a barber-y, Ophelia –
Lead thy ways to a barber-y,
Where’s your father, the Barber!

*****

Ok only or what?

Tryst with an Early English Novel

Hi friends…

I was reminded of this incident when I was writing the previous post…this happened way back in 1997 in Bangalore…I was working on my PhD at (the then) CIEFL, here in Hyderabad, and my parents were residing in Bangalore…I had gone there for a brief break in June… I was working on the early days of the novel in Kannada and books and information and research material on this topic was difficult to come by and moreover, scarce…so, Bangalore was the place where I would visit all kinds of book shops, old and new, and places like Kannada Sahitya Parishat and Karnataka Sahitya Academy and Kannada Pustaka Pradhikara to see whether I could get hold of early novels, articles in old Kannada journals, books on criticism in Kannada, etc., and one such bookshop that I would visit every time I visited Bangalore was located in Jayanagar 4th Block in the shopping complex there…I would also buy other kinds of books also there like English novels…and one such English novel I purchased there was one of the earliest novels to be written in English…

‘This’ novel was published in nine volumes between 1760 and 1767 (yeah…that early!!!)…Prof Aniket Jaaware, who taught us English literature at Fergusson College, Pune, would often talk about ‘this’ novel when discussing early English novelists like Richardson and Fielding, though ‘this’ novel was not prescribed for our study… ‘this’ novel, he said, defied the conventions of novel writing at a time when the ‘novel’ was just about beginning to establish itself as a genre in English literature and pointed out the unique narrative employed by the novelist…like distortion of chronological sequences, blank pages, blank sections in within chapters, actual drawn squiggles to indicate the movement of how a particular character flourished his cane, chapters only with chapter number headings with nothing else in it (almost telling the readers that I don’t have anything to tell in this chapter!!!), chapters that begin with a lot of star marks, and so on…the novelist looked to be actually laughing (sarcastically, I think) at the entire convention of novel writing…and poking fun at the various trappings of the new genre…I was intrigued and curious and went to the college library to take a look at ‘this’ novel…a cursory look was enough to understand the novelist’s intentions, though I didn’t read it at that time…

So, when I saw this novel in this shop in Bangalore, I bought it…and it was one of those inexpensive editions and didn’t burn a hole in my pocket…the first thing I did when I went home was to flip over the pages trying to locate all the ‘interesting’ things that the novelist did with ‘this’ novel…and as I was doing this, I noticed that almost ten pages, from 209 to 128, were missing…I was frustrated and was getting irritated thinking about the distance that I’d have to travel to return this and get an unflawed copy…I went there the next day and (fortunately, I hadn’t written my name or covered it with a polythene sheet as is my usual practice…) showed them the book and the page number jump and asked them to give me a complete copy…the shopwallah (again, I forget the name…) took out another copy of the novel and gave it to me…

I thanked him and before leaving, I thought I should verify this copy to see if it was complete in all respects…I did a good thing…this copy too had the same page jumps…I showed him this copy and he was surprised…and then he brought out all the copies that he had and we started flipping pages…I found the same problem in all the copies that I examined…and he too found the same problem…by now, I was getting angry…he then told me that probably all the copies in the stock that he got were flawed and started blaming the publishers and printers for not paying attention to such things…he said he had another unopened box of novels from the same publishers in his storehouse and that he’d get it the next day and it might have whole copies of the novel and that I can get my fresh copy then…I was thinking of another wasted journey and a return the next day…

I don’t know what struck me, but I paused for a few seconds and told myself…this can’t be possible, decided to further examine the novel…when the novelist has done so much to twist around the form of the novel, he could be ‘trusted’ to make further mischief…I went to page 208 and read the page …it had continued from the previous page and I saw the heading ‘Chapter 23’ in the middle of the page and the page ended in a sentence with a full stop…so, Chapter 23 has only begun…it probably continues in the missing pages…and I then saw the next page, 219, it began with a chapter heading ‘Chapter 25’…oh, so, the entire Chapter 24 is missing and a substantial part of Chapter 23 along with it…without much interest, I glanced disinterestedly at the opening paragraph on page 219…I struck my forehead with my palm…dhath teri ki…why didn’t I guess…being a literature student, I should have had some literary instinct and after everything that the novelist had done to ‘this’ novel, he was not above pulling another narrative trick…and there it was on page 219 opening paragraph of chapter 25…the evidence of another narrative trap…

“ – NO DOUBT, SIR – there is a whole chapter wanting here – and a chasm of ten pages made in the book by it – but the book-binder is neither a fool, or a knave, or a puppy – nor is the book a jot more imperfect (at least upon that score) – but, on the contrary, the book is more perfect and complete by wanting the chapter, than having it, as I shall demonstrate to your reverences in this manner. – I question first, by the by, whether the same experiment might not be made as successfully upon sundry other chapters – but there is no end, an’ please your reverences, in trying experiments upon chapters we have had enough of it – So there’s an end of that matter.

Very clever…and then the novelist goes on to tell in the next paragraph…

But before I begin my demonstration, let me only tell you, that the chapter which I have torn out, and which otherwise you would all have been reading just now, instead of this – was the description of my father’s, my uncle Toby’s, Trim’s, and Obadiah’s setting out and journeying to the visitation at ****.

I don’t know how many of you have experienced this…I then showed this to the shopwallah…he was not at all amused…

The novel is Tristram Shandy and its writer…Laurence Sterne…

In the current post-modernist age where playing around with the narrative is de rigueur for many novelists…Laurence Sterne stands out as the ‘dada’ of all post-modernist novelists in a pre-modern age…sadly, this ‘art’ was not taken up by subsequent English novelists and we had to wait for the post-modernist age to see such ‘deceptions’ again. That part will be for another post…

First encounter with Amitav Ghosh's new novel "Sea of Poppies"

Hi folks…
I’m back…I was away on a short vacation and visited Gaya (Bihar) and Ranchi (Jharkhand)…Gaya is where Shruti’s parents live…and this time, the visit, though short, was memorable…for many reasons…I felt more comfortable this time around…I was visiting Gaya for the third time…and the visit to Bodh Gaya was extremely satisfying, more because this time we had our own camera…the soaring tower of the majestic Mahabodhi Temple fascinated me no end…I will give out details and photos in subsequent posts…

A few days before I left for Gaya, I was so busy wrapping up things at my college that I found no time to post…it is stale news now, but when it happened I was eager with anticipation…I had bought my own copy of Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies…the cover was so beautifully designed and light coloured that I realised that it would become dirty very soon and as is my usual practice, I covered it with a transparent polythene sheet…I started reading immediately…and was soon engrossed in the lives of the novel’s various inhabitants…but I couldn’t read much…I thought I’d be travelling soon and it would be a good thing to read the novel on the train…soon, the day of our departure to Kolkata (en route Gaya) arrived and I eagerly returned to the Sea of Poppies…so many reviews have already been written by eminent critics and writers and they are all available on the net… I won’t go into the details…I was enjoying the wonderful multi textured world that Amitav Ghosh had created and most of all I liked the way Amitav-da used different tongues – laskari, bhojpuri, the international sailors’ argot, the Anglo-Indian patois, etc., to take the reader into a different world…a different time…I have always admired Amitav-da’s ability to seamlessly weave in uncommon research-based topics (malaria research in The Calcutta Chromosome, cetology in The Hungry Tide, opium trade in Sea of Poppies, 12th century India and modern Egypt in In an Antique Land and so on) into the narrative of the novel…with such ease that you don’t see the effort…but more than this, it is Amitav-da’s favourite themes that one sees delineated with great concern here…

I have to get back to what I wanted to write today…I was reading the novel with great pleasure…and enjoying the reading very much…Amitav-da is a master storyteller …and if you have read The Calcutta Chromosome and The Hungry Tide…you know that he is a master of suspense too…I was somewhere after page 300 and as I finished a page on the left and looked up to start the page on the right…I felt odd…something was wrong…the previous page had ended with a full-stop…and now this page began mid sentence…I realised what was wrong and looked down to see the page number…after 314 it was 283… these things happen (I am reminded of a similar incident with another celebrated book…next post, ok?) and I flipped the remaining pages to see if 315 onwards occurred later…instead it was 283 to 314 once again and the novel resumes from 347 on…I was frustrated, disconcerted, and terribly irritated and all this in the train…it was evening around 7.00 PM…Shruti, always practical, asked me to call up the bookshop, Book Selection Centre, Secunderabad, and inform them about this damaged copy… we wouldn’t be back for another 15 days and who knows what the bookwallah will say…and I was mentally scanning my study trying to locate the bill/receipt…I dialled the number and the phone on the other side was ringing…nobody was picking it up…I tried again…and again…the Book Selection Centre people don’t delay answering the phone…then it dawned on me that it was Sunday and the shop would be closed…the frustration and irritation remained…then Shruti told me that it is only a matter of 30 pages and in such a large novel nothing much would have transpired…I was unenthusiastic…and continued to sulk…and then with nothing much to do and with a scowl, I went back to the novel…I started reading from 347 onwards and completed the novel…but the feeling of having eaten curd rice without pickles still remained… and we reached Gaya the next day…and sometime midday, I called up Book Selection Centre and told them about this problem…they told me that they would replace the book…I was relieved…then, another thing started nagging me…I had written Shruti’s and my name on the inside title page and date of purchase and had covered the book with transparent polythene…I was wondering whether the shopwallah would take back such a copy…this thing kept coming back and harried me no end…we returned on the 28th evening…it was late in the evening and I was tired…I decided to go to Book Selection Centre on 30th (Monday) and return the flawed copy of the novel…and that’s what I did on Monday evening…I went sheepishly with a silly smile to the counter and showed them my copy of the novel…he (after almost 15 years of purchasing books from Book Selection Centre, I still don’t know the names of the owners there…shame on me…but I know them and they know me…that’s enough, no…?) promptly said that he would replace the copy and proceeded to do so calling his assistant…I said that I have covered it…he said, ‘no problem, sir’…I said, I have also written my name, will that be a problem…he said, ‘no problem, sir, we will replace the book…’ I was so happy and relieved…and then he proceeded to very carefully (with a paper knife) remove the transparent polythene cover that I had stuck with a tape to the hard cover of the book…after removing it, he then proceeded to cover the new copy with it, again very carefully…I was touched with his gesture…I told him, I’d do it once I’m home…but he insisted and I didn’t know what to say… I was more than happy…

I am going to read Sea of Poppies once again…and thank the good people at Book Selection Centre while sailing on the Sea of Poppies…