Last week when we went to Silchar and I reached Bangalore airport, I realized that I was too early. The reason was the Aero Show in Bangalore. Because of this Aero Show, which takes place at a Air Force ground just few kilometers before the airport, a lot of traffic jam was happening. So everyone kind of pushed me to start early and I obliged and I reached the airport even before 4pm while my flight was scheduled to leave at 6:20pm!
As I was crossing the Aero Show venue, I saw four fighter planes doing somersault in the sky! I was almost jumping with excitement as I was watching such a thing ‘live’ in front of me for the first time in life.
As I crossed the security checking gate, to my pleasant surprise, I found one Crossword book store there. I was jumping with excitement again. I asked for the book ‘Simoquin Prophecies’ by Samit Basu at the counter but they ran out of stock. What to do, I started checking other books. Suddenly something at the bottom most rack in a corner caught my notice. There were some books with familiar cover page. Those books were having cover pages similar to those of old Bishwabharati books. I got curious and sat down to check them properly. To my surprise, I found that those were English translations for the novels/stories of some famous Indian authors. There were translation works for Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Roy, Premchand and more. Since I have read almost all of Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Roy and most of Premchand’s work in the original languages, I wasn’t really interested to check them out. But there was another book, standing quietly, next to Satyajit Roy’s collection; it was ‘Quilt’. I saw the name and something clicked in my mind and in that fraction second as I was looking down for the author’s name, I knew who was that celebrated author before even seeing the name. It was Ismat Chghtai. The book was nothing but the translation for her most famous work ‘Lihaaf’. I was holding the book stunned as I hardly could believe the sheer discovery as I didn’t know that Lihaaf got translated and that it was available in stores! I grabbed it immediately. To my more surprise, there was the translation of Toba Tek Singh by Sadat Hasan Manto lying next! I was flabbergasted! What was happening! I had no idea of Toba Tek Singh ever getting translated either! I grabbed that too!
As I was coming out of the shop jumping with joy, I didn’t know that there were more pleasant surprises waiting for me in the journey ahead :)
No comments:
Post a Comment