Heaven lake, silk route and other idle thoughts

I was browsing through my bookshelf a couple of days ago and came across an old copy of  From Heaven Lake by Vikram Seth. As I hadn't read the book in over a decade, I started re-reading it. The book describes a hitchhiking journey that Seth took through western China (Xinjiang) and Tibet to reach India in the early 1980s. At that time he was an exchange student in Nanjing University and wanted to return home one summer by traveling through a part of the silk route. In his travelogue he talks about the changing landscapes and the people he meets as he moves through deserts, grasslands, flooded river basins and the Tibetan plateau. I thoroughly enjoyed reading From Heaven Lake again.

The book then got me thinking about the silk route. Seth starts his tale in Turfan- a town in the Xinjiang (Sinkiang) province of western China. The names of other Silk Road towns like Kashgar, Khotan, Samarkand and Bukhara bring up so many colourful images to my mind. Since yesterday I have been thinking about how I can travel at least a part of this route. Covering even a small part of the route would mean going through at least three countries (China, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan to start with). Some of these regions are quite volatile politically. A quick search on the internet shows that various travel groups in China offer guided tours of the silk road. However, like Seth, I too detest the regimentation of organized trips. They also don't come cheap. Since I don't speak Chinese (like Seth does), I am quite incapable of making my own impromptu travel arrangements even if I somehow manage to land in one of these towns. I still need to figure out a way to make this trip happen. Hopefully before 2020.

Second-hand bookshops

I grew up in Kolkata which boasts of an entire street full of second-hand bookshops. I don't think there is another city in the world with something close to Boipara. Wikipedia calls it the largest second-hand book market in the world. It is hardly surprising then that I developed a taste for old and used books. I strongly feel that the kind of second-hand bookshops a city has speaks volumes about the city's character.

I discovered the Select Bookshop off Brigade Road after I went to live in Bangalore. A modest-sized house was converted entirely into a shop. Here books were stacked from floor to ceiling in every room with hardly any moving space between them. The oldest books had their covers torn off and no visible titles. I had a lot of fun in picking up one of those and trying to guess what it was about. My most prized buy from Select is a special edition of R. K. Narayan's The Emerald Route, illustrated by R.K. Laxman.

One couldn't ever fool Mr. Murthy, the owner, when it came to the price of the book though. I must say he was pretty generous with students and sometimes would even throw a book in for free if we couldn't afford it. A trip to Select on a Saturday morning almost always ended with coffee and scrambled eggs on toast at the Indian Coffee House on M.G. Road.

Then I moved to Paris and the bouquinistes on the bank of the Seine immediately reminded me of Boipara. As I spoke and read very little French, I could only buy old copies of Tintin comics from them. Pretty soon I discovered shops in Paris where one could find used English books. Shakespeare and Company near Quai St. Michel sold both old and new books. During most weekends in summer I used to take the RER B from the Cité Universitaire to St. Michel-Notre Dame, pop in to Shakespeare to buy a book, and then spend the rest of the morning reading on the banks of the Seine.

I can't remember where I first heard about Tea and Tattered Pages. The name caught my fancy, and one Sunday after lunch I set off for rue Mayet- an otherwise non-descript residential area of Paris. This bookshop also doubles as an English teashop. But what I loved the most about this place is that it had lines of poetry randomly displayed on the bookshelves.

On my way home from work I sometimes saw a serious-looking (i.e. bespectacled and bearded) young bookseller outside the main gate of the Cité universitaire. He would put his books down on the steps outside the gate and then simply start reading one of them. He rarely made any effort to sell his books. I bought my copy of Le Petit Prince from him. I never found out whether he was just an impoverished student trying to make some money by selling off his old books or a regular bookseller.

I have moved yet again- to Cambridge this time. There are quite a few old bookshops here, probably as an outcome of the large student population in the town. The travel writing section of the Oxfam bookshop on Sidney Street is one of the best I have seen until now. The other Oxfam shop near the Magdalen bridge also has a small but good collection of books. Galloway and Porter, although not a second-hand bookshop, always offers good discounts on new books. But amongst all the bookshops I have been to in Cambridge- and I have been to almost all of these- the Amnesty bookshop on Mill Road has the largest selection of both fiction and non-fiction works. And most importantly, you end up supporting Amnesty International everytime you buy a book from them.