Since we moved to the hinterlands, we have lost the pleasure of browsing in bookshops, except on rare visits to Chennai or Kochi. One or two shops in Palakkad have a small collection of airport-style novels. In most of the others, as you step around the pencil boxes and water bottles, a young man emerges from stacks of notebooks to ask, Which course, madam?
A dear friend in Delhi took pity on me some years ago and offered to send me books from my favourite shop on Janpath. I asked for Margaret Drabble's The Peppered Moth and he sent me a book on Zen philosophy. Whenever my husband goes to Bangalore or Chennai he phones me from the bookshop and I shop by proxy. (Do you want The Sunday Philosophy Club ? Okay. Paulo Coelho? No, no, no!) At best we find one or two titles in this manner.
The A.A. Book Centre in Coimbatore used to sell library discards and shop remainders from the United States. They covered a much wider range than any small-town bookshop could manage, and they were cheap. I bought armloads, laying them up against the drought I was sure would come one day. And it did. The shop no longer deals in used books, though A.A. opened a lending library in Palakkad that keeps me happy.
Online shopping is essential if we want a particular title. My debut order was the Seamus Haney translation of Beowulf . For Rs. 250 and free delivery I expected a cheap India-only edition, with some typographical errors. What I got was an impeccable Norton critical edition, and the supreme happiness of getting a book in the post. Since then, editors have sent volumes by post for review, sometimes in slender packets, sometimes in a hefty cardboard box. Generous friends send book parcels. I recently bought a book in a most unorthodox manner. I handed cash to the publisher over a dinner conversation one night in Thanjavur and some weeks later I got an elegant anthology, Poetry with Prakriti , in the mail.
My new high-tech source of books is my e-reader, a Kindle that my brother gave me. I downloaded one book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind , and will get to it very soon. But this is my best hope for the more obscure titles on my curiosity list, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon , the English translation of Ponniyin Selvan , or The Planet of the Apes .
Still, the charms of my book post do not fade. The postman often leaves them at our neighbour's shop a kilometre away. Our neighbour brings them home at lunchtime. He meets me when I go to buy milk in the afternoon. So when I fill up two litres in my can, my neighbour hands me a fat parcel. The other women who have come to buy and sell milk see my radioactive glow and ask what I've got. Books, I say. The conversation turns back to milk, and I walk home with my can, my books and my glow.
anantharaman.bookwise
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