Guest Post by Dilip M. Menon

Unlike Salman Rushdie, I did not grow up kissing books, I merely collected them. From provision stores, sidewalks, and from booksellers who were eccentric enough to try and survive by selling second hand books, in the small towns and yet-to-become cities of post independent India. The books came with a fine patina of dust that no amount of smacking against one’s thigh or the flat of one’s palm could get rid of. Kissing them was out of the question. In what was called the mofussil, or the provinces, the detritus of empire and the war that ended it gathered, as the collections of effects of the British who departed, as much as those who stayed on and died, gathered in the auction houses and bookstores.

It was on a summer afternoon in 1973 that I cycled down to the local provision store in Pune and saw beside the sacks of rice, wheat and spices, a pile of books, periodicals and rather lurid posters of European women with very long legs and few clothes on. I had always imagined Europe to be a cold place. In the pile were old Penguins; books by Enid Blyton, Anthony Buckeridge, Capt. WE Johns, Rider Haggard; periodicals like Boys Own Weekly, Gem, and Magnet; and of course the war comics (the staple reading of Allied troops posted in India and South East Asia), from which I learnt my German. At school, during the break, we were always running through the corridors shouting Schnell, Schnell and calling our Kamerads Schweinhunds. But on that summer day, I found two authors that I had not heard of: George Orwell and Frank Richards. The former had written a book about some fat pigs and the latter, one about a fat boy, and being rather plump myself, I was favourably disposed.

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