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...