I had walked the
entire books-strewn stretch at Abids and found nothing of interest … I felt I
would be returning empty handed … and then Vinod took me across the road
adjacent to the GPO, where there was a lone seller with some books arranged on
the pavement … there weren’t many books and I wondered what I would find there
… I was on the pavement and Vinod was on the other side of the railing, on the
road … the book titles were facing Vinod!
He spied a book and asked me to pick it up for him … it was then that I
noticed this book … Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s The Love Letter and Other Stories (translated from the Malayalam by V. Abdulla) ... superb, I thought, and picked it up … Vinod had picked up a copy of this book
a couple of weeks back and had posted a picture of its cover and I had envied
him … this is an out-of-print book, but the cover was not as good as Vinod’s
copy … but the rest of the book was in good condition and I picked it up … (Wikipedia has a fairly informative page on Basheer ...)
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| The cover is the reproduction of a lithograph by Laxman Pai - Illustration for Jayadev's Geet Govind No. 8 |
This book is published
by Sangam Books, Hyderabad, and was first published in 1983, and this edition
is a 1996 reprint … quite old, actually … I was aware that Sangam Books was a
sort of imprint or division of Orient Longman (now Blackswan), based in Hyderabad … at the
end of this book, there is a list of books published by Sangam and I saw that
they had also published another translation of Basheer’s two ‘novelettes’ in
one volume, Voices/The Walls (also translated by V. Abdulla) ... after I came home, I went online to the Orient Blackswan site and checked
whether Sangam is still on and saw that it was … I eagerly scanned the Sangam books
list to see if they still had their old titles … but alas, they publish only
text-books sort of books now … what happened to their literary titles, I wondered
… I checked the titles by Orient Blackswan and saw that they
had a book by Basheer … Poovan Banana and Other Stories … I tried
to see what stories this book contained, but the site had no information … I continued
my search and there was this site called printasia.in which gave me this
information … and what do I learn? … Poovan Banana and Other Stories is a
combined edition of both Basheer books earlier published by Sangam, and one
extra story!! … chalo, at least, these Basheer stories in English translations
are not out of print, though the Sangam editions are … they are there in another
guise … so, those of you who are looking for Sangam editions of Basheer’s books
of stories, Poovan Banana and Other Stories is the answer … I did some more
online book sleuthing to find out what happened to another Basheer book of 3 stories in English translation that seems to have gone out of
print ... the happy result is for another post …
I picked up another
book from the same seller and also by the same publisher, Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Pratidwandi
… I had read this writer’s book Those Days earlier … the cover of Pratidwandi
was also not in a good shape, but I did not want to let it go … Pratidwandi
was made into a film by Satyajit Ray … I got both books for Rs.20 each … how do
I protect their covers now?
The third book I got
was The
Two Ronnies - But First the News … Ronnie Barker
and Ronnie Corbett performed together in comedy sketch shows on BBC and this
book brings tighter some of their jokes, dialogues, and repartees … very nice
wry British humour …
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