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 …
