Vaikom Muhammad Basheer … another out-of-print book resurfaces … split into three (??) …

When I found The Love Letter and Other Stories the other Sunday at Abids, it set me off on a search for Basheer translations in English … I love book detective work … and after lots of surfing discovered that the two Sangam out-of-print editions The Love Letter and Other Stories and Voices/The Walls was available in one volume as Poovan Banana and Other Stories and was published by Orient Blackswan (Sangam’s parent) … Poovan Banana and Other Stories also has an extra ‘bonus’ story … the cover looks like this … I haven’t yet bought the book though …

I wanted more Basheer and wanted to know if the Penguin (Viking India) book ‘Me Grandad ‘Ad an Elephant (translator: R E Asher) was available anywhere … my friend Satish Poduval was working with Basheer stories for a while, long back in 1993 or so, and I remember seeing a hardback copy of this book with him … then when Satish, Srinivas Prasad, and I were on a trip to Ranchi, we stopped at Vijayawada for a day to meet Venkat (Acharyaha), and invariably ended up in a bookshop and there were saw a paperback edition of the same book … Srinivas Prasad bought that copy … after that I haven’t seen another copy of the book … the book contained three long stories (or novellas, one might call them) and was subtitled ‘Three Stories of Muslim Life in South India’ … the cover looked like this …

I tried to find a copy for myself to buy later, but couldn’t find one anywhere … at that time e-commerce and online shopping were not yet words that buzzed … and recently, I located one copy on amazon.com, but that was too expensive for me … but after I bought The Love Letter and Other Stories, the urge to buy Me Grandad ‘Ad an Elephant became more intense …

I visited all sites that came up when I hit the ‘search’ button with ‘Me Grandad … in the google window … I then went to ‘images’ … and then I saw this image of a cover with the name Me Grandad ‘Ad an Elephant which was different from the one I had seen earlier … it had the names of the author and the translators on the cover … there was a stylised ‘m’ on top, sort of the logo of the publisher … it didn’t look like a Penguin or Viking book … I clicked on the image and was taken to the Kerala Book Store site … and there I saw the cover clearly …  and more details … the publisher is Mathrubhumi Books and this book is a recent one, published this year … aah! … after all these years, the book surfaces with a new cover and a new publisher … how nice I thought … and I saw that two more covers (small images) of Basheer (English translations) titles were displayed on the same page … have they published more, I wondered, and clicked … one title was Pattumma’s Goat and the other was Childhood Friend … again I wondered … and then I realized … though I hadn’t read the book that Satish had, I remember him talking with his Malayalee brethren and sistren about Basheer stories and the names Pathummayude Aadu and Balyakala Sakhi  came up frequently … Me Grandad ‘Ad an Elephant, along with Pathummayude Aadu and Balyakala Sakhi  made up the “three stories of Muslim life” … yes, that one book has been made into three books now … and more importantly, these Basheer stories are now available again … thanks to Mathrubhumi  … and they are not expensive … I bought all three …