Shruti
wanted all of us to visit the Book Fair.
She hadn’t visited the HBF for many years and yeah, we set out on a
Sunday afternoon. I was open minded as I
only wanted to check out the second hand books stalls. I had a vague list of names of authors whose
books I am currently thinking of hoarding.
I think all three of us were going to the book fair just like that. First we’ll go there and then see what
happens. Actually, that’s a good approach. You mean, like ‘life is like a box of
chocolates and that sort of a thing?’ Yeah,
yeah, that sort of thing, exactly.
Anyway,
off we went on that Sunday afternoon (17 Dec 2016) to the Hyderabad Book Fair. That Sunday happened to be a Children’s
Special Day or something and as we entered the Fair, we could see a number of children
seated under a shamiana and a young lady was telling them a story. It was quite nice actually, though I didn’t stop
to see, I could hear her very clearly. She
was a really good story teller, and brought the story alive with vocal sound
effects, voice modulations, songs, and solid narrative skills. She soon finished with the story she was
narrating and started another story, and this time it was a story from
Bengal. She started with a sort of children’s
song and that caught my attention. I had
learnt this song and used to sing to Mamoon with my rudimentary singing skills
and pathetic Bengali pronunciation. So, I
was listening to the narration as I was entered and exited the first few
stalls.
My interest
was only in second-hand book stalls and I kept firmly to that line of enquiry. It was a Sunday and there was a huge crowd of
children accompanied by their parents. A
number of them could be seen excitedly browsing and persuading their parents to
buy books for them. I am not a pessimist
as such, but it was heartening to see parents also obliging their
children. It was already half an hour
and I had gone in and out of half the stalls by then and not a single book to
boast of. I was not too disturbed. I saw that Shruti and Mamoon were on their
own trip. I went over to them and saw
that they were looking for ‘chapter books’ in English for Mamoon. I continued my desultory search. I saw a bunch of teenagers chattering
excitedly about nothing in particular and shouting out names of books and
authors … have you read this … no, I haven’t
… did you see this book? yeah, I saw it
in that stall over there … which one? The
one over there … really? I swear, I saw
it … and this yikkering bunch would either move in front of me or follow me
to a second hand book stall … oh god, it was so frustrating …
And in
between I managed to find a book I recognized … it was an Orient Paperback
edition of Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope … I bought
it purely for nostalgia’s sake … I have read about the novel and almost everything
that I have read says that it is a formidable novel … and also I bought it as a
companion to my copy of Kanthapura, also an Orient Paperback
edition.
And by that time I had lost
interest in my search, what with the yakking teenagers and my somnolence. I went over to Shruti and Mamoon and they had
selected some English ‘chapter books’ for Mamoon. Now they wanted some easy to read Telugu and
Hindi story books … I joined the search and I was told to look for books with illustrations,
large letters, and only three to four lines in a page. We went in and out of many book stalls and
put together quite a collection for Mamoon.
And in
between one of the stalls was giving away copies of The Quran in English
translation. I took one.
When we
finally finished our browsing and buying and came out, I saw those babbling teenagers
again. When I saw them outside the book
fair enclosure, they were not weighed down by books or anything. It looked like these jabbering teenagers bought
no more than three or four books altogether.
Considering the racket they were creating, I felt they’d buy at least 50
books. Bloody racketeers …
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