Summer Reading

Summer Reading

While growing up in Mumbai, summer holidays was usually spent rummaging through the bookcases of my equally bookish friends..collecting a handful and settling down in a darkened room with a ice-cold glass of lassi (buttermilk- for recipe refer next blog of Amrita.. yesugarden.blogspot.com) . My father worked for the Railways so all the apartments were similar-and so all the bookcases were open wooden cupboards built into the wall and going way down..Invariably that was the same floor space for the sofa set s and as most of the homes displayed curios like minature Taj Mahal and marble fish and peacocks from marble mountains and trophies of kids .. the books usually occupied the lower shelves and were often hidden from view by the backrest of the sofas. So I have had this childhood memory of retrieving hidden treasure from behind sofas ...piling them up and reading them..It was a common joke then that we found our books in our friends bookcases and vice versa.. we read perry mason, arthur hailey, Alistair maclean.Ken Follet and of course PG Wodehouse.. The latter a lifelong favorite ,never gone stale always adding the right zest to life... I recently read two good ones ..Pigs have wings and Full Moon ...blew away the tedious part of grant writing..all this made possible by the opening of a small lending library bang opposite my home in K.K. Nagar. It is called Sri Kumaran lending library and has all adventure, suspense, romantic, historical novels and most importantly PG Wodehouses..Mumbai used to have plenty of these small libraries wedged between paan(tobacco chewing) shops and textiles stores spilling over its dilapidated walls with books...they dotted almost every street nook much like a Starbuck store these days..I thought Madras would never sprout one ...and in the last 7 years I had to travel an hour to get to the British Council Library or American Library to get a handful of books...But now the landscape seem to be changing...a library close to home... who could ask for more