Going back to Botswana...with the No. 1 Ladies Detective...

Dumela Mma…Dumela Rra…

I was back in Botswana for the last two weeks…reading four more novels in The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series written by Alexander McCall Smith and catching up with the redoubtable detective Precious Ramotswe, her assistant detective Grace Makutsi, Mma Ramotswe’s long-time fiancé and now husband Mr J. L. B. Matekoni, the owner of Speedy Motors, his two wayward apprentices, the matron of the orphan farm, the formidable Mma Potokwani…and so many other lively people out there in Botswana…

In one of my previous posts, I had written about my first tryst with this series…I had bought and read five novels in this series (separately, not in one go…) and it was so loooonnnng ago…

Though the cases in the novels are not interlinked, and each novel stands on its own, there is a continuity on terms of the lives of the main characters that connects one novel to the next in the series.  I realised this when I read In the Company of Cheerful Ladies and discovered that Precious Ramotswe and Mr J. L. B. Matekoni are married.  I knew that they were engaged for a long time, but didn’t know when they got married.  I searched around and found a chronological list and then I saw I had read the sixth in the series (In the Company of Cheerful Ladies) and had missed reading the fifth The Full Cupboard of Life (I didn’t have therefore, couldn’t read!!!)…

I wanted to fill this gap and thought its been a long time since I visited Botswana and spent time in the company of the cheerful ladies…and other gentle people who make this series come alive.  I went to my trustworthy and favourite online store www.indiaplaza.com and placed orders for The Full Cupboard of Life, Blue Shoes and Happiness, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, and The Miracle at Speedy Motors…I received these 4 novels in 2 instalments and I finished them off one by one…like a famished reader…

Precious Ramotswe, the lady detective, is in top form and so is her assistant Grace Makutsi…and others…and more than crime solving it is the life in Botswana, with its gentleness and unhurried pace and change of seasons and nice people and cattle, that attracted me…these novels are a leisurely read… for Mma Ramotswe no problem is too big not to have a solution and a steaming cup of bush tea is all she needs for her brain to start ticking furiously…

A small haul of books at Frankfurt...

No…no…no…I didn’t go to Frankfurt, but somewhere that sounds similar, and that too in Hyderabad…

For Hyderabadi book lovers with modest means, this is the closest that we can get to the Frankfurt Book Fair…

There is this once-used (i.e., second-hand) books’ stall that had intrigued me whenever I travelled along the Begumpet road…and it was called Frankfurt Foreign Book Sale…I was tempted to go in and browse, but somehow I was always in a hurry…going somewhere…no time to stop…and so I missed visiting this books stall…

(This is how the Hyderabadi Frankfurt Book Sale looks like...this photo is taken from the justdial.com website)

Then this summer, I was on vacation and alone in Hyderabad and I had to pay some pending bills and wanted to visit some familiar shops in Secunderabad…then it occurred to me that I could visit Frankfurt…and I had run out of books of my favourite authors and wanted that familiar suspension of disbelief…ha ha ha…

And so with a heart laden with hope and anticipating a big catch of Parkers and Rankins and Leonards, I left the shores of the great city of Nacharam and headed bravely towards the heavily fortified shores of Begumpet weathering storms and battling mile high waves and choppy waters…and reached Frankfurt…

I entered Frankfurt tentatively and started looking around and at the far end against the wall were tables on which ‘pulp’ fiction books were arranged neatly and alphabetically… one of the salesmen there came to me and wanted to know if I was looking for anything specific…I saw Robert B. Parker…he pulled out some books from that pile and placed them in front of me and then went in and got some more…wow…so many Parkers!!!  I was prepared for this expedition this time and took out the list of Parkers that I had…I was looking specifically for Spenser novels…and in that pile of Parkers were a lot of non-Spenser novels…so, I kept them aside…and there were a lot of Parkers that I already had and read…so, those too went out of the pile…and after all this sorting and sifting, I was left with only three Spenserian Parkers…Cold Storage, Pastime, and Rough Weather…only three…not much, but okay…what to do…the dissatisfied soul that I was, I wandered around in the hope of finding some more and asked for Rankin…and they scurried around and ferreted out one Rankin from some pile…Exit Music…finally, I could manage four novels…

After I came home with the small haul, I read the blurbs and realised that Exit Music is the last in the Inspector Rebus novels by Rankin...and that gave me that much needed rush to start reading Exit Music first...

And for the next five to six days it was frenzied reading and I finished all the four, sometimes reading up to 4 in the morning and waking up groggily at 6…