Essay
In the bookstores of London
Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford. --- Samuel Johnson In these last few remaining days of my latest visit to London, there is that certain tinge of sadness which must come to anyone who loves this city. And who doesn't love it? What Samuel Johnson said of London all those years ago remains true of everyone who has since had cause to travel to London or stay here. Life is what London is all about, especially when it comes to the range of reading material it offers you. My sadness is not that I leave London yet once more. It is that I will miss its bookshops, its libraries, the sights of its residents lost deep in reading as they take the tube to work and back. In these past few days I have been to Waterstone's at Piccadilly looking for books for my niece. And then I have been to the pretty imposing Ripley's building nearby for a Ripley's Believe It or Not encyclopaedia for the twins, a nephew and niece, back home in Dhaka. But then, a visit to a bookshop in the West, and especially in London, is a thrilling quest in search of intellectual gems you are unlikely to come across anywhere else. The gems were there aplenty at Waterstone's, obviously. And since of late my interest in Africa has been getting pretty pronounced as an academic activity, I moved toward the Africa books section. The difficulty with these large bookstores is that often, much against your will, you find yourself in a dilemma. With all that huge collection before you, what do you buy and what do you leave out? There is forever the chance that you will take a long time to decide what to pick to read at home. On that afternoon, as the skies darkened outside and the rain began to fall, it was a young Haile Selassie who stared at me out of the cover of a slim volume. Ah, anyone who has recalled the fall of the Ethiopian monarchy in 1974 cannot but make a grab for such a gift. Ryszard Kapuscinski gladdened me that afternoon. My pleasure was doubled when the back cover informed me that Kapuscinski had written a similar book on the fall of the Iranian monarchy as well. He had also planned a work on Idi Amin but then ended up abandoning it. It didn't matter, for at that point I spied Kapuscinski's Iran work a couple of shelves away. I came back home with two Kapuscinski works, The Emperor and Shah of Shahs. What more could one ask for? This strolling about in bookstores, this chance encounter with books you have read about or have been quite unaware of --- this is London. There are the Oxfam bookshops, though I must tell you of the anguish which greeted me when I went looking for the one I visited on a gloomy evening last winter on Gloucester Road: the bookshop was not there. A sign of the recession that yet seems to keep the West in its grip? I have no idea, but when you see bookshops go missing or being downsized (that last bit happening with a fair degree of regularity in Dhaka), something painful makes its way into your soul. I will miss that Oxfam bookshop, to be sure. But, again, London brims with bookstores. A few days ago, on our way to a lunch appointment in central London, my wife and I strolled down Haymarket wondering if there was any play we could watch. At the end of the road where the route takes you toward Trafalgar Square is a whole range of art galleries, which were a delight. My delight assumed somewhat bigger proportions when, tucked away among the galleries, a small bookshop offered a tantalising array of books. That was Ducketts, a bookstore which bravely informs you that it deals in politically incorrect books. The patrician, elderly owner with that distinctive flavour of an Oxbridge education about him (you draw such a conclusion by the way such individuals speak their English) sat reading a volume. I could have spent an entire afternoon in that shop, but then there is all that banality of life beyond a bookstore. I came away with a copy of Con Coughlin's Khomeini's Ghost. So there I was, with two works on Iran --- Kapuscinski's and Coughlin's. Could my happiness be greater? Speaking of bookstores, there is the more than a century-old shop the family of my friend Michael Sheringham owns on Great Russell Street. Arthur Probsthain's is a small, eclectic collection of works, some rare and seminal, from Africa and the Orient. Indeed, the bookstore proudly tells book enthusiasts that it is specifically a haven for African and Oriental books. Arthur Probsthain's organised the launch of two books based on Firdausi's Shahnameh (Muhammad Juki's Shahnamah of Firdausi by Barbara Brend and Epic of the Persian Kings: The Art of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh by Barbara Brend and Charles Melville) at the end of September. It was a small gathering of erudite men and women, of the kind that throws up good conversation. I came away with Alex Madsen's Silk Roads, a work on the Asian adventures of the young Clara and Andre Malraux, and Chinua Achebe's historically significant Things Fall Apart. I will miss London as I fly out of it, with all those books that will keep reminding me of the need to be back again. The Royal Society for Asian Affairs, for whose quarterly journal I sometimes do book reviews, has made me gloriously happy: it has pushed five books into my waiting arms, for me to read and then to write about. At the Leytonstone library, I have regularly stumbled on quite a few good, old books for sale. My best buy this season is a 1977 Penguin issue of The Galbraith Reader. Outside my window, the leaves on the trees turn pale in the swift gyrations of an increasingly cold autumn. Winter is on its way. What if I sat at this window, even as the winds howled and the cold rain poured and the snow shrouded the earth in gleaming white, and read on --- till those final few seconds of life?
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