Second reluctant visit to Best Books sale...and found some books...

Usually, I visit the Best Books sale at least two times every time they put up a sale at YMCA, but after the disappointing first visit this time around, and the sheer lazy attitude of the people in charge there, I thought once is enough this time...and the other day I was feeling rather restless in college and left an hour early...and got a direct bus to JBS from Ghatkesar ...temptation reared its alluring head and I bought a ticket to JBS...half a kilometre before JBS is a traffic roundabout and next to the roundabout is YMCA...the light turned red, the bus stopped, and I hopped off the bus and went straight the sale hall...I don’t know what I expected there this time... it couldn’t have been better than last time... these guys hadn’t brought their crime fiction and thriller collection from their main shop, lack of space they said...huh...not even one Dave Barry... the literary fiction collection was so so and the rest of the collection I found fantastically boring... anyway, since I had contrived to reach YMCA, I looked around disinterestedly... I picked up a couple of books and put them back on the racks... and slowly and slowly found these...

The blurb said this novel is a Booker winner...and I liked the unassuming cover...nothing more nothing less...

This looked like a crime fiction book... hadn’t heard of the author... the name of the investigator also appealed... promising...and book is in mint condition...

 Another crime fiction book, looks like that...again, author is new to me... I only hope the promise held out by the cover is not belied by visceral stuff inside...quite possible actually...

 Crime fiction again...the title is good...haven’t heard about the authors at all... Scandinavian?  Probably...

I have the entire series actually...just that the first one is missing and I found this in mint condition...

Didn’t want to leave this behind...might read it some time... Telugu verse play translated into English...and then there is Warangal...

Finding Arun Joshi’s novels...

Some months back Vinod started writing posts about his search for Arun Joshi’s novels...and it was a pretty intense search...he seemed to be obsessed with buying and reading all novels by Arun Joshi...

He would recount in his posts how he managed to find one more in this bookshop...and another in that bookstore...Joshi had written five novels and a collection of short stories...and Vinod had reached a stage where he managed to locate three and two more were left...and it was at this stage that we met at Abids one Sunday and he started talking about how Joshi’s novels were nothing like one has seen or read in Indian English writing...he asked me if I had read any of Joshi’s novels...unfortunately, I hadn’t read any and told him so, but I had heard his name in the context of Indian Writing in English and had seen his books in bookshops in Pune while I was doing my MA...and I was particularly intrigued by his book The Strange Case of Billy Biswas...it was around that time that I was also reading English novels written by West Indian, Australian, and African writers, and had read V S Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas... I wanted to read Joshi’s novel too, but didn’t manage to...and now Vinod was taking me back to those Pune days and I too started getting interested...that day Vinod said he was looking for two novels which he hadn’t managed to find yet...The Apprentice and The City and the River...I told him I will check online bookstores and see what comes up... and I did that... I discovered that all Joshi novels were marked as ‘out of print’... I too wanted to buy them, but this was a dampener...

Joshi published all his books through Orient Paperbacks’ and not one of those big ticket publishers with deep pockets to enable publicity and book launches and readings...possibly one of the reasons why Joshi has remained in the background despite writing such good novels... In one of Vinod’s early posts on Joshi’s novels, one of his friends said the fact that Arun Joshi is such a good writer is a ‘well-kept secret’...I still remember Vinod’s response...he said, ‘it is not a well-kept secret, but a little-known fact’...

Then Vinod wrote an ecstatic post where he said he found and bought the remaining two Joshi novels at the Delhi Book Fair, that too at the Orient Paperbacks’ stall...that set me thinking and I immediately went to amazon.in and saw that all Joshi’s novels were back on the shelves... I was thrilled...I ordered all of them in one go... I had lost one chance earlier, now I didn’t want to lose this chance... but due to some reason The City and the River was cancelled after I had placed the order (I wonder now...in that post, Vinod wrote that he noticed some strange happenings at the stall) ... but all the other four Joshi novels were delivered within four days... and I started reading The Strange Case of Billy Biswas  immediately... and was rewarded with a riveting reading experience...

Three books (only!) at Best Books Sale, YMCA, Secunderabad

I have been looking forward to the Best Books Sale this time of the year...Vinod first alerted me about the date, which was to be 1 September... I told him I’d be in Secunderabad area sometime in the evening and might find some time to have a look...he said he too had similar plans...then on 1 September I receive text message from Best Books about the sale...that evening, there were three stops on the way to a get-together and I couldn’t manage the time... I was determined to visit the sale early on (early bird catches the worm and that sort of thing...)

The next day I took some time off college and went book hunting...my first enquiry at the counter was...”any Robert Parkers, Elmore Leonards, Ian Rankins...?” “No, sir ... please visit our Lakdi-ka-Pul shop, there are some...we haven’t brought them here this time...”  early deflation of enthusiasm...I had actually come prepared with lists of books of these writers and some more, with titles I had already read ticked off and so on... I was pretty disappointed...

Since I was there anyway, let me look around and see what catches my eye... I knew I’d find something...he he he...the “literature” section holds some promise always... I could see a number of Umberto Eco titles... I have all his novels... there were quite a few Albert Camus books too... most of them familiar titles that I already have... I picked up one which I hadn’t seen/read before... I read in the blurb that it was his last novel, manuscript found among his papers and published posthumously, The First Man... then I saw an Italo Calvino... Calvino is always a treat... I remembered the time when I found two Italo Calvinos at the BB sale a couple of years ago... this was a book of short stories... Numbers in the Dark and other stories... nice... 

 I can consume one slice at a time... but Krishna, mind is not satisfied... then I realised I did not have enough cash on me and had forgotten to bring my debit card...so, that strangulated my book-buying power ... with this new constraint, I contemplated putting the Camus book back on the rack... let’s see, for the moment I’ll hold on... I saw Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund... I had seen this book long years ago in an old friend’s house and was intrigued by the cover page and description on the blurb, and this novel kept popping up here and there at regular intervals and it was the same cover...this time I decided to stop this popping up and dropped it onto my basket...

I looked at the prices of these books...oops! ... together the total came very close to what I had in my pocket... I’d be cutting it very close and I had to reach home and keep at least a couple of tenners in reserve as well... that settled it then!  I re-considered the Camus book and with reluctant resolve, kept it back on the shelf...and headed to the counter with only two books...sigh...

A bunch of ladies were being served at the counter and I envied them...they had together bought 25 BOOKS!!! 

It would be some time before their big purchase would be billed and I wandered along the tables nearby looking aimlessly at the books arranged there...my eyes fell on a book with a striking blue colour and a tempting title...The Picador Book of Blues and Jazz (Ed. James Campbell) ... this was too tempting... the book had articles, stories, and poems on Jazz and Blues by well-known writers and Jazz/Blues performers... I checked the price...it was less than the Camus book that I had returned to the racks (I have to convince myself somehow, no?  he he he...) ... I hastily picked it up lest I change my mind (I am fighting me, you see...)

I checked my precarious finances...ok...just about enough left to reach home comfortably...and for a cup of chai...

Mumbaistan...Piyush Jha’s 3-in-1 crime thriller

I was generally browsing crime fiction books on online bookstores and getting intimidated by the prices, especially while simultaneously imagining how less it could cost if I could get them in Abids...then I came across this book called Mumbaistan...for starters, the price was not intimidating on Infibeam...and they were giving a generous discount on MRP...and that motivated me click on more details... I liked the title and the cover...the description on the site didn’t say much, but whatever it was, it sounded promising...then I read that the author Piyush Jha had earlier made films too... I had particularly liked his film King of Bollywood with Om Puri in the lead (I haven’t watched his other films)...that kind of warmed me to the author...a kind of confidence that he wouldn’t disappoint ... the book bio on the site said that the book is a collection of three crime thrillers set in Mumbai...all these prompted me to click buy...

 At the bottom of the page I noticed another book by the same author ...Compass Box Killer...khatarnaak title re bhai...and it said An Inspector Virkar Crime Thriller...the cover was splashed in yellow and blood red and tempting... the title again intrigued me – Compass Box Killer?  I think school students still call the box of mathematical instruments the compass box (though it also held the protractor, setsquare, ruler, apart from the ‘compass’) ...can’t say...anyway, we used to call it the compass box...a killer with a compass box?  hmmmm... not bad...hit the buy button...

Waited for four days or so to receive both books... I started with Mumbaistan immediately...it has three stories...Bomb Day, Injectionwala, and Coma Man...lovely spicy titles... I finished the book in three sittings...one for each story... absolutely loved Bomb Day...without revealing what happens there, I would like to say here that Piyush Jha takes us on a fast and bumpy ride into the seamy and shady Mumbai where cops and criminals, informers and dealers, pimps and prostitutes play hide and seek in such out-of-this-world seedy locations like A-1 Air Cooled Hair Cutting Centre, Dr Chitlekar’s Lie-in Clinic, Falkland Road, Chitra Basaar, Friendship Lodge, Sultan-e-Hind Restaurant, Sewree Christian Cemetry, the hole-in-the-wall teashop...Piyush Jha takes the action to such a level that you do not know who is who...who could turn out to be what...and characters like ACP Hani, Tanvir, Rabia, Aalamzeb, the ATS police...reading the goings on is thrilling no doubt, but you are also made aware of the lurking danger at every turning, every minute...the enormous risk and sacrifices being made by the police to protect Mumbai and its people...without them knowing what is happening in these back alleys...absolutely fantastic...I liked it immensely... I could breathe normally only after I finished Bomb Day...

After the high octane ride in Bomb Day, the pace slows down in Injectionwala...the turmoil happens inside the characters in this story... and results in crimes of retribution...less of a cops and terrorists story like Bomb Day...more of a detective and killer story... and here were are introduced to Inspector Virkar... passionate about his work, tenacious investigator, physically fit, toyed with the idea of joining a neighbourhood gang in his youth, comes from a lowly background, rises up through hard-work, has spats with superiors, past humiliations keep haunting him, rides his Bullet motorbike, has his favourite beer...all boxes ticked... despite all his problems, Virkar is a cop with a conscience, like most fictional detectives...

Injectionwala is a different kind of crime thriller from Bomb Day, but no less intriguing and suspenseful and Piyush Jha keeps the action going smoothly with brief side stories about his main characters...as I wrote earlier, the pace is considerably slower, as it is mostly in detective stories...and when it comes to an inspector in the police department, then contending with hierarchy and dealing with bureaucracy takes up a lot of space (pages in the book) and time (of the inspector detective)...and on top of that if the inspector himself is a troubled person, then some more space goes into describing his problems... but on the whole the story is interesting and constructed well...and each killing reveals a new fact and slowly and painstakingly all these are pieced together to reveal the killer...and of course, the killer has a reason for all these killings...and of course, you have Inspector Virkar, the cop with a conscience...deciding how to close and present the case...

Coma Man is a complete contrast to the first two stories...it is one man’s search for truth and love...no detectives or inspectors here...a man rising up from coma after almost 20 years to go in search of his wife and to find out why he went into coma 20 years ago...again here, we get a ringside view of the other Mumbai as the Coma Man stumbles through slums and gets in and out of buses and clutches of local gangsters... though there is suspense almost till the end, the intensity in the earlier two stories is missing...I tried to find out why, but couldn’t put my finger on it...

After Mumbaistan, I started Compass Box Killer...and here Piyush Jha gives a whole book to Inspector Virkar...I hope Piyush Jha continues to write and give us a series of Inspector Virkar books...

And is Compass Box Killer interesting?  Well...well...I hope to write about it too...