The Sunday book bazaar

 

There are pirates crouched down in the crowded sea. They emerge suddenly and quickly rap your bottom. And here you are left with a Beslery or a Kenley. The bottles look exactly like the original: same shape, wrapper, color and marking. Just for the one letter difference. Nothing frightful apart from the fact that you drink simple tap water for twenty rupees. You get a livid look on your face once you have consumed it and then realize the difference. You have been tricked and feel like an utterly callow person.

Me and my friend have our respective Beslery and Kenley and reach the Sunday Book Bazaar at Mahila Haat, Delhi. The boy fraudster melted in the crowd.

There is a mute hawker of small items like socks, belts, hankies, purses, pen and key rings by the entrance gate to the book bazaar. It’s a smart geographical location because the clients are less thuggish if they are going to buy books. And who would bargain with a seller who cannot speak? At least bookworms won’t. But he is not deaf. He can listen and that’s more important. I have a doubt that he has a very nice tongue to speak. In that case it’s a nice strategy. He easily sells four sets of cheap socks to me without the slightest opportunity of bargaining from my side.

There is a lot of springiness in the air because many girls are buying books. It’s a lovely sight at the open-air book bazaar in late October. There is a great book lover moving diligently with a haversack half full of books.

A scratched placard fittingly displaying old classics stacked in compact horizontal rows on the ground, their spines up to catch the bookworm in you. Bookworms get a tremulous kiss by the fair-lipped maiden—the urge to buy books. There is a problem of plenty actually. As a book lover you have to squabble with your urge, an onerous task—to not buy everything on account of how much weight your wallet and back can carry.

There is another real book lover—a lovely wayfarer amiably walking pulling a trolley bag to fill it with books, the lightest and the loveliest weight one can carry.

A girl in aromatic rumples of sleep carried by her purple maxi. She looks just out of bed after the soundest sleep. A very short guy with her walking with the longing of a lightening bloodhound. He gives the feeling of pork; she stewed vegetables. I’m lost in books, my friend in her loose hair. She flicks her hair so suddenly that I’m startled out of my book-spell. She looks back at us with an unreconciled haughtiness of the young for the uncles nearing middle age—as if reminding us that we were born too early; that the dreams of our youth are a common stale reality now. Aah, unsubmissive youth! My friend feels the pangs of inter-generational enmity. His spirits plummet, the steps lose energy and he walks as if clad in grave-cloths, his mood swaddled in burial attire.