Books at Abids on 23 August 2015 …some for Mamoon, some for Baba ...

It was almost a month since I had met Vinod at Abids … yeah, that same visit that triggered the Macd(D)onald books frenzy and which sent me on a wild-goose-chase (why chase goose?) of secondhand book shops across Delhi, Mumbai, and Hyderabad … anyway, there were some other reasons for which I wanted to meet Vinod … and Shruti had wanted me to locate Telugu & Hindi letters practicing books for Mamoon at Abids … Mamoon is learning to read and write Telugu & Hindi at her school, you see … and we wanted some extra practice books … and since I had bought all these secondhand books in the last 4 weeks or so, I was not thinking of books for myself …

I met Umashankar and Srikanth first … Uma noticed my watch, a blue-dial HMT Kohinoor mechanical … and he had acquired a black-dial HMT Pilot, which he was wearing … as this mutual watch admiration was going on, Vinod walked up the road to the Irani and we went in for our chai and osmanias … Uma and Srikanth were apparently very hungry, Uma more apparently so and they went on to demolish five plates of pooris … they went about their job silently, efficiently, and methodically … and general talk about politics, books, literature, etc. … I had brought a book for Vinod, The Laughing Policeman …

Then we started on our rounds … the place where I had earlier purchased mathematics and colouring books for Mamoon didn’t seem to stock these kinds of books anymore and I had to widen my search … I had told Vinod about my ‘mission’ and as soon as we crossed the road and went to the other end of Bata galli, Vinod espied a seller with these reading and writing practice books arranged on the pavement … I was glad that I could find some good practice books, both Hindi and Telugu, so soon … 

Since the main reasons for visiting Abids were taken care of, I was pleased … my book hunting was not so enthusiastic … I would usually dip into the piles of books to see what treasures are hidden below … but I just took a cursory look, found one or two books of mild interest and then put them back … this went on for some time … but you can’t return without books after a visit to Abids on a Sunday, can you?  It is like going to Tirupati and coming back without laddoos … concentrate … try harder … I told myself … I picked up a couple of books, then put them back … it was all desultory … and across the road I saw another set of writing practice books, and picked up some more for Mamoon … each of the books I bought for Mamoon cost around Rs.10 or so …

Then I entered into that shopping complex, which looks like a tunnel from the road … and there were again heaps and shelves and piles of books … I went to a small neatly arranged stack of books arranged on a sort of table … and the board said … Novels: 3 for Rs. 100 … I saw the arranged books … a couple of them seemed interesting … I wanted one more … put the two back … and saw the titles again … it was like those buy 2 get 4 free offers that you see in shops like Megamart … you want to buy one shirt, and end up buying 6, and out of that you actually like only two … you wear the other four half-heartedly … I couldn’t buy only two … I tried hard and picked up an Ian Rankin title, that I knew I already had, but then I thought … what the kangaroo, I’ll give it to one of my students …  Len Deighton’s Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy and Elmore Leonard’s Cuba Libre were real finds for me …