He reached the locality fairly easily. It was a cluster of quiet, leafy streets with mostly independent houses of varying vintages. Here and there a car – as often as not, an Ambassador or a Fiat – stood quietly, parked just clear of a gate, windows rolled down, driver snoozing. Naresh had to stop at an istri vandi, a mobile ironing service, to ask where Fifth Cross Street was. The man, filling his iron with coal and sprinkling water on a formal shirt, gave him directions that confused as much as they enlightened; but they were good enough to get Naresh to his destination.
Old No. 35, New No. 43, Fifth Cross, must have been at least fifty years old. The paint covering the outer walls was blackened by grime in several places, and there were large patches where it was chipping clean off. Between the small, creaking metal gate and the front of the building was a small patch of garden: a row of Ashoka trees, tall and unbending, formed a screen along the wall, while further in, a coconut tree arched gently over the top of the house.
He walked up to the veranda, which was closed off by a patterned iron grill that had a door in one corner. A middle-aged couple sat on an old sofa. Naresh asked for Mr Sundararajan.
‘Sundararajan? Yes. Upstairs,’ said the man, pushing a pair of thick glasses up his nose. He pointed to a staircase at the side of the house, winding its way up along one wall to a door on the first storey. The ground floor must be rented out, Naresh reasoned. But now that Sundararajan’s family had decided to sell the house off to a builder of flats, Naresh wondered where the tenants downstairs would find themselves in a few months’ time.
‘Hello, sir, come in,’ said Mr Sundararajan, as he opened the door. ‘Please.’ He stretched his arm out towards a sofa in the living room.
Naresh left his sandals at the door and made his way towards the sofa. At the far end of the room was a small dining table with two wooden chairs; on the wall adjoining it leant two metal folding chairs of the kind Naresh had not seen for at least ten years. There were a few prints of waterfalls and countryside scenes, and a Tamil calendar of the sort where each day has its own slip of paper, to be torn off when the next day arrives.
‘What will you have? Juice?’ the old man asked, sitting down in an armchair across from Naresh.
‘Oh, nothing, sir. Please don’t bother.’
‘Are you sure? Tea-coffee? Ice water?’
‘No thank you, I’ve had my evening coffee already,’ said Naresh with a polite smile.
‘Alright then. Let me show you the collection.’ He walked over to a corner of the room. Two teak-wood cupboards stood side by side, like twins clad in identical clothes and standing at attention when an esteemed aunt or uncle has come to visit. The similarity ended there, however. The shelf on the right was clearly reserved for recent and often-used books. Several of them were familiar-looking orange-spined paperbacks. There were a few dictionaries in English, Tamil and Sanskrit, an almanac and a railway timetable. Mr Sundararajan did not look up train timings on the internet. ‘These are the books I’m going to keep,’ he said, pointing to this shelf. ‘The ones I want you to look at are in the other cupboard.’
The cupboard had sliding glass doors of the kind that had baffled Naresh when he was a toddler trying to get at the toy vehicles in his cupboard at home. Each corner had a small wedge-like depression where you were meant to hook your fingers and pull the door. As a rule, the doors would not slide smoothly; and if you did manage to move them, you found, when you had closed them to, that the two handles now faced inwards instead of towards the corners of the shelf. Sundararajan pulled open his doors with a practised movement, and immediately Naresh’s nostrils were tingling with the familiar smell of unrestored old books; the smell that signified to him the coming of a weekend of work, mouth and nose covered with a handkerchief to keep out the dust and bits of paper.
He could see immediately that this was the collection of an avid reader. Not only were there the usual books on law and the civil service, but also a varied selection of authors, some famous and some who had since faded into 0blivion. There were several old Penguins, with the green, blue and orange bands that signified different genres; the light-coloured middle bands of their covers had yellowed and browned with age. There were also hard-bound volumes with golden or silver lettering. Some books had been covered with brown paper, title and author’s name scribbled with a ball point pen on the spine. Naresh took out a few books at random. He first opened each one gently, and when he found that the pages were intact and not crumbling, gently fanned them with his thumb to see whether there were many loose pages. Having scanned the titles, Naresh made a quick estimate of the number of books. Between thirty and forty books on each of the six shelves; around two hundred books in all.
‘What do you think?’ Sundararajan asked.
‘It’s a very interesting collection,’ Naresh said. ‘Certainly many of these would fit right into our fiction section. The atlases and the books on geology I would be able to buy too, but I couldn’t offer you too much for them. They don’t sell all that well.’
‘Do you know what you might be able to offer in all?’
‘I can’t say exactly until I have made a full list, sir. But as a rough estimate, I would say about seven thousand rupees.’ In Naresh’s experience, the average book sold at Connoisseur for about seventy-five rupees. He was willing to pay thirty-five for each, in addition to which he would spend five or ten rupees’ worth on each book to restore and label it.
‘Seven thousand. Hm… That’s a lot of books, you know. I have collected them over forty years. And you won’t find some of those books very easily.’
‘I understand, sir. It’s never easy to dismantle a library you have built with so much care. But then I’m constrained by what I can sell the books for.’
For Naresh, this was the most difficult part of buying books for Connoisseur. Sometimes you got sellers who cared two hoots for the books they were selling you. But more often than not, they were people who cherished books, but had come to a stage in their lives when it no longer made any sense to keep their libraries. They had no space for them any more; they were not using them often enough; they had nobody to give them to. A voice within told them that the books should go to someone who would use them. Naresh hardly felt like negotiating prices with this sort of seller. He knew that money was not their sole motivation. Nor was it for him; but he had to make a living, at the very least.
The old man looked out of a window for a while before turning to face Naresh.
‘Alright. You may make a catalogue and give me a final estimate. I don’t really mind about the price. I just want to know that the books will be well handled and not thrown away or used as waste paper.’
Naresh nodded. ‘I will send someone from my shop tomorrow, sir. He will call before he comes. Hopefully we can finalise it tomorrow, give you a cheque and transport the books.’
Sundararajan walked him to the door. ‘You know,’ he said. ‘I have occupied this house for the last forty-five years. I don’t know what life will be like in a seventh-floor apartment in a Mumbai suburb. No space for all those books, they told me. I suppose it will just be TV.’
