Sunday, January 18, 2015

The first Abids books haul in the New Year … and an old Donne anthology …

This post should have been posted before the previous post, but that did not happen … today is the second Sunday since the first Sunday of 2015 when I visited Abids on 4th January … the visit was less to do with finding and buying books … I wanted to meet Vinod, Umashankar, and Srikanth and greet them on the new year … when I reached Abids at around 11.15 AM, the triumvirate were already there … Vinod called me while I was a little distance away from Abids and told me to come to their favourite chai adda … as I was legging my way towards the Irani café, I was pleasantly surprised to see three of my students browsing books at one of the roadside heaps … Vaishnavi, Sandhya, and Rahul are students in my first year B. Tech. Computer Science branch and a couple of months ago I had told my students about the second-hand books market at Abids on Sundays and practically harangued them to at least visit the place once … and unable to bear my daily reminders some of them did visit Abids subsequently and also purchased some books … since almost all of them are first-time fiction readers I had told them what type of books to look out for and after browsing and buying, they brought the books to college and showed them to me proudly … I was actually deeply touched … and when I saw these three students at Abids on the 4th, I felt good … I wanted to spend time and search for books with them, but my friends were waiting and I told my students that I would catch up with them later and went on to meet Vinod & Co. 

The table was crowded at the Irani café and I saw that there was another person there with the triumvirate … Umashankar introduced me to him and him to me, saying “Jai, meet Jai” … I forgot to ask his full name … could be Jayashankar … and after the invigorating cup of Irani chai, we set out on our hunt … for a long time I couldn’t find any book that caught my attention … I was also looking around to see if my students are somewhere around … couldn’t see them … during the search, I was able to help another book-seeker to locate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance … I found this book in a Rs. 20 heap inside the building and actually thought of buying it and then put it back … this person was also looking around and asked a bookseller with well-arranged stacks of books in front of him for the Zen book … I heard him and called out to him and pointed out the book to him in the heap … and the other bookseller kind of looked peeved … and the bookseeker was surprised and happy … “wow, only 20 bucks,” he said …

Almost after an hour’s search, I found three books in the Rs. 20 heap right at the start of the lane … two books were by Roddy Doyle … I picked the first book, the snapper, based on the blurb on the back that said, “…exploding with cheerful chauvinism and black Celtic humour…” the second Doyle book was the woman who walked into doors … I didn’t want to leave a Doyle book behind and picked it up … and of course, the blurbs had nice things to say about the book and the author …




The third one was for pure nostalgia … it is a collection of poems by John Donne, a favourite of mine during my UG and PG days … and Prof. M. S. Nagaraja Rao, who introduced Donne to us in Shimoga, made each poem come alive and after 20 years or so, I still remember the way he taught us Donne’s poems and other Metaphysical poems …



As you can see below, termites also seemed to have liked the book and they have left their considerable mark on the pages … the book is also marginised and annotated by the ‘first’ owner of the book, whose name is inscribed on the title page … Chenna Lakshmi Pathi, M. A. Eng. Litt. it proudly states …










The book looks nice and cute with the termite marks and the owner marks and also has a very nice old-book smell … out of curiosity, I checked out the name on Facebook and indeed there was a person with this name currently located in Chennai, and he had studied in Nizam College, here at Hyderabad!!  But I don’t know if it is the same person … and I didn’t want to stretch my curiosity further … if it were alive, one could have asked the cat … 

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