A visit to a book fair on Independence Day

On holidays, the best place to visit in Mumbai is the once bustling central business district in south Mumbai. The offices are closed, there’re fewer cars on the road, still fewer pedestrians on the footpaths, and plenty of room on the wide and sweeping promenade fronting the Arabian Sea at Marine Drive, popularly known as Queen’s Necklace because of its shape. It stretches from land’s end at Nariman Point, once the hub of banking and commercial activity, to Chowpatty, a flat beach located about 3 km (4.8 miles) away. This is VIP territory as the offices and homes of government ministers and secretaries, police and municipal commissioners, influential businessmen and industrialists, and assorted celebrities are located in the area. As a result it is the cleanest and most well-maintained part of the city.

The Queen’s Necklace at Marine Drive.

In the suburb where I live, 22 km (35 miles) north of the city, the only places a family can visit on holidays are swanky malls, supermarkets, multiplexes, food courts, and restaurants, and all these are crowded and noisy. But there is only so much you can do in these places: buy stuff you don’t really need, watch a film you know you'll soon catch on cable, frantically look for a seat in a food court, await your turn outside a restaurant, or loiter about the mall and get in someone's way. People do this for fun every weekend.

Visiting relatives is a grim option. I don’t fancy it on a holiday and, I’m sure, neither do they. In Mumbai, you treasure your holidays and your privacy and the last thing you want is to be with people.

On Thursday, August 15, India’s 66th Independence Day, the family took the ‘local’ train to south Mumbai. Train because it is the fastest, quietest, and surest way to get to anywhere in the city. It took us half an hour by a fast train to reach Churchgate, the last station on the western line and a stone’s throw from the picturesque Queen’s Necklace. It would have taken close to an hour by road, much longer on a working day.

You’ll find the places we visited at the bottom of the map. 
© www.mumbainet.com

We first went to a popular book fair at the nearby Sunderbhai Hall at New Marine Lines, not far from my office. Ashish Book Centre, organisers of the book exhibition, had on sale over a million books in nearly all genres. Most of these books were selling at 50 to 85 per cent discount. People thronged the fiction, cookery, management, children and young adult, interior and architecture, and reference sections the most.

The only problem was finding a title you had in mind. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. While books were lined up or stacked in categories, the spines facing towards you, there was no method or pattern to it. They were all mixed up. I'm not sure the organisers know their books well.

The fiction category was impressive but in a disarray. I ran my fingers through row after row of books and saw many familiar names, some I’d read, some I hadn't, like Patricia Cornwell, Stuart Woods, Anne Perry, Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, David Baldacci, Deborah Crombie, Danielle Steel, Stieg Larsson, Jeffrey Deaver and hundreds of others, both old and new authors.

Most novels were selling for Rs.50 or Rs.100 ($1 = Rs.62) and they were all in brand new condition. I picked up five books, put away four, and bought one—Me Tanner, You Jane, an Evan Tanner paperback by Lawrence Block, for Rs.50. I don’t come across his novels often. The others can wait another holiday, another book fair.

From Sunderbhai Hall, we took a taxi to Colaba Causeway, the famous shopping boulevard, where we ate at a small continental restaurant called Café Churchill. The wartime British prime minister glared at us from one of the walls. We had a meal of fish and chicken fingers with chips, burgers with chips, country style chicken and mixed grill, with grilled sauce and garnished with boiled egg, lemon and peach iced tea, and chocolate cake. On the way back to Churchgate station, we stopped at an old ice cream parlour called K. Rustom’s which serves slabs of ice cream tucked between thin biscuit slices. I spoiled it all by ordering a lime and lemon ice cream for myself. It tasted like orange peel.

Here I must mention that the places we went to were less than a kilometre from the places that were attacked by seaborne terrorists in November 2008. These were CST (Victoria Terminus), a major railway station, two 5-star hotels, a café frequented mostly by foreigners (a few buildings from Café Churchill), and a Jewish outreach centre.

Before I wind up our I-Day celebration, I’ll tell you what the Lawrence Block novel is about. I haven’t read it yet but here’s what it says on the back cover…

“It’s a jungle out there. Literally. At least for Evan Tanner, eternally sleepless sometime superspy, who finds himself in Africa on the trail of the AWOL ruler of tiny Modonoland. It seems the petty despot’s gone missing, and he’s taken the state treasury along with him. No stranger to impossible missions and international peril, Tanner’s been in over his head before. This time, however, he’s in imminent danger of being buried alive.”

I loved the first line of the book. In typical fashion, Lawrence Block writes, “I have never liked funerals. I can appreciate the advantages of conventionalizing one’s relationship with Death, but this appreciation has never advanced beyond the level of pure theory.”

I think I’m going to get to the book faster than I’d planned.