The Book Hunters of Katpadi

by Pradeep Sebastian

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Neelambari Adigal and her young associate, Kayal, together run Biblio, a one-of-a-kind store of rare books in Chennai, specializing in modern Indian first editions. The lives of these passionate bookwomen revolve around curious browsers, eccentric book collectors, private-press printers and the occasional thrill of unexpected discoveries of the antiquarian kind. On a book-collecting trip to Ooty, Kayal stumbles upon an incendiary manuscript, long thought to be a myth, purportedly authored by explorer and translator Sir Richard Francis Burton. Almost simultaneously, a cache of priceless editions that looks like it could be from the 300-year-old library of one of the greatest book collectors the world has ever known, turns up at the bookshop. When it falls upon the two women to authenticate their finds, Neela and Kayal discover, quite suddenly, that their lives are more full of bibliographic intrigue than they could ever have imagined. India?s first-ever biblio-mystery, The Book Hunters of Katpadi, is the book every lover of the written word has been waiting for. In the tradition of the greatest in the genre, it holds within its pages adventure, action, suspense ? and the sheer thrill of close encounters with prized print-on-paper.

Release date: October 20, 2017

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 292

Sample

1



The Priest in the Bookshop

On a Tuesday in February that felt like it would be the last cool evening in Chennai before the sweltering heat engulfed the city, a priest in a black cassock and white clerical collar hurried into an antiquarian bookshop, strode up to the young woman at the desk and demanded to know why the shop was trafficking in stolen books.

Startled, Kayal looked up from the book catalogue she was working on.

He was possibly in his early sixties, Kayal noted, short but fit, with gelled silver-black hair severely combed back. The white clerical collar band made his black cassock look more like a tux.

‘I’m Reverend James Satya, a chaplain at MCC… Madras Christian College, you know,’ he announced in a rather plummy voice, and looked expectantly at her, as if the introduction was explanation enough.

‘You mentioned something, Reverend, about, uh, stolen books?’

‘I’ll come to that later. First, tell me…you deal in old books, correct?’

‘Antiquarian, yes.’

‘Which section is that in the bookshop?’

‘That depends on what you’re looking for. Nearly everything we stock is antiquarian in some sense.’

‘I’m looking for antiquarian theological editions.’

Kayal pointed the priest to a complex of glass bookcases across from her desk and returned to the catalogue.

Months later, the two bookwomen of Biblio – Neela, the owner, in her early forties, and Kayal, her young associate – would recall that it was after the priest’s visit that a series of highly charged bibliophilic events came to grip their lives. On this pleasant February evening, however, the only thing on Kayal’s mind was finishing up work on Biblio’s first catalogue of rare, fine and first editions. For several months now, she and her boss Neela had been working on this catalogue with great relish, and Kayal wanted the bookshop to herself for the rest of the evening to work out the tricky business of identifying modern Indian first editions.

Take Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August, for instance. She had before her the 1988 Faber UK hardcover edition and the ₹40 Rupa paperback. Both were first editions, but if you followed the flag – as you had to in determining these things – it would have to be the Rupa edition, scruffy as it was, that counted as the real thing. The Faber edition in hardcover and handsome binding looked more like how modern first editions were supposed to, but it was in Rupa’s paperback edition that the book had been read first by most in India, the author’s country of origin. So Biblio had decided that both editions would be included in the catalogue and offered as firsts.

Not surprisingly, the Rupa paperback was the scarcer edition. All through the eighties and nineties, copies of it had been commonplace – you could have them for as little as ₹50 from pavement hawkers – tattered, well-thumbed, flying from hand to hand as the book’s popularity spread by word of mouth to create, arguably, the first cult novel in modern Indian English fiction. (For those who felt that Sasthi Brata’s Confessions of an Indian Woman Eater was more deserving of the title of ‘first cult novel’, Biblio had that too in the 1973 Sterling paperback, Delhi, and the 1971 Hutchinson hardcover, London, along with his autobiography, My God Died Young, 1968, Harper, New York.) Today, you would be lucky to find copies of the first Rupa printing (they would most probably be circulating-library copies, coming apart at the seams), while you could still source copies of the Faber edition in good condition from online antiquarian bookshops.

But the catalogue would have to wait, Kayal realized; the priest had materialized at her desk once again, looking terribly impatient, even upset.

‘The sign says to ask for assistance with the books in the bookcases,’ he began. ‘The cabinets are all locked...’

‘Just ignore the sign, Reverend. We have those up simply to discourage people who handle books far too, um, informally. It helps to hint that the books in the glass bookcases are rare and valuable and need careful handling. You’ll notice that the key for each bookcase is left in the lock itself. Please feel free to take the books out and have a look at them.’

The Reverend hurried back to the cases without another word.

‘Some of those books haven’t been priced yet, though...’ Kayal called after him. But she had lost him; he was too preoccupied with opening and closing the cabinets’ glass doors, one after the other, in a somewhat frenzied manner. A collector-priest, and such a keen one too! Curiouser and curiouser, thought Kayal.

Biblio was located in the leafy neighbourhood of Adyar, just beside the Theosophical Society, whose vast wooded grounds, thick with banyan groves, keep the streets in the area a little cooler even through Chennai’s humid afternoons. When it opened its doors in January 2016, Biblio became India’s first full-fledged antiquarian bookshop, dealing in rare books, fine editions and the book arts. In setting it up, Neelambari Adigal had avoided the typical commercial retail spaces occupied by most Indian bookshops and housed it in a place befitting a cosy antiquarian business: her Adyar home, a traditional Karaikudi cottage built in the 1930s. For years she had run her antiquarian bookshop from a Besant Nagar flat as a by-appointment-only business, but she had been yearning to make it an open, brick-and-mortar bookshop. And her Adyar cottage, it struck her one day, had just the space and atmosphere such a rare bookshop needed. In remodelling the cottage to fit Biblio’s image, she had retained everything that was traditional and charming about it: The red-tiled roof, the red-oxide flooring, the famed Karaikudi teak doors and pillars (that had come all the way from Burma), the little courtyard garden with jasmine and champak trees and the brick path that led from the gate to the entrance through the garden.

It was not just the location that made Biblio stand apart. When Neela had planned its interiors, she had paid special attention to the way books would be stocked and arranged in her shop. Absent was the atmosphere of purposeful clutter you usually saw in second-hand bookshops, with volumes overflowing from shelves, piled up on the floor and along the aisles. A friend who ran a second-hand bookshop had once remarked to Neela, ‘The moment I shelve everything and bring order to the bookshop, customers stop coming. Now I leave everything lying around and they’re happy.’ As charming and welcoming as that might seem to casual browsers, Neela knew that an antiquarian bookshop that served the serious book collector couldn’t afford to have books lying around in joyful chaos. Biblio’s stock of rare, fine and first editions, displayed in glass-enclosed bookcases, were meticulously stocked and beautifully arranged.

Upon entering Biblio, the first thing you saw was a riot of pulpy, lurid colours – the bright yellows and reds and greens and oranges of vintage paperbacks, displayed face-up because they were collected for their cover art. Past this cosy veranda-room of genre titles, the bookshop opened out into the spaciousness of its glinting heart – the room with the glass cabinets housing the shop’s most valued stock. Kayal worked out of a large desk placed in a corner from where all the bookcases were in full view. Turning a house into a bookshop had certain advantages, such as more rooms, tucked-away spaces – like the one leading off from the heart of the bookshop, which Neela had turned into a compact office for herself, and a third room that doubled as stockroom and kitchen, which could be reached from the garden.

Kayal’s favourite section in the bookshop were the shelves dedicated to the book arts – the art and history of manuscripts and the printed book. Here, you could find an entire range of books and ephemera dealing with typography, bookbinding, papermaking, calligraphy, memoirs of antiquarian booksellers and collectors, bibliographies of presses and biographies of bookshops. Kayal had persuaded her boss that Biblio should, yet again, score a first by being the first Indian bookstore to devote not just a shelf or two but an entire section to these subjects, making theirs a deep and comprehensive collection of books on books gathered in one place. After all, this was what Biblio was all about – curators and evangelizers of the art and craft of the printed book.

The bookshop had fallen silent; except for the priest, all the other browsers had left. Kayal looked at the time: 8.20 p.m. – ten minutes to closing time, and if the priest wasn’t gone by then, she would have to shoo him out. She turned her attention again to the catalogue. Pricing modern Indian first editions was a challenge, but she and Neela had been looking forward to the task. The whole point of putting out the first-ever book catalogue of modern Indian firsts was to not only inspire Indian bibliophiles to collect books from their own country but also to set up some debate and discussion on what could be viewed as a true modern first edition in India and how much it would be worth in the antiquarian book market.



Neela knew that an antiquarian bookshop that served the serious book collector couldn’t afford to have books lying around in joyful chaos.

Against the Faber English, August edition she lightly pencilled in ₹5,000 and against the Rupa paperback, in its near-fine condition (the spine wasn’t cracked and the cover was bright, with no edgewear or creases), ₹3,000. She smiled to herself, remembering its original list price. ‘If you happen to own a decent 1988 copy,’ Neela was fond of telling fans of the book, ‘and you aren’t too attached to it, bring it in and Biblio will be happy to give you ₹1,500 for it.’ Neela herself owned a very interesting association copy of the book – inscribed to Dev Benegal (in part, it said, ‘Thanks for getting it right…’) and signed by Upamanyu Chatterjee – and she had been itching to include it in the catalogue. But Kayal had talked her out of it; it was the kind of thing you regretted parting with the moment you sold it and Kayal was aware that no one knew this better than her boss, the best – and perhaps the only – Indian bookwoman in the rare-book trade.

‘But think of what an exciting first-catalogue item it would make!’ Neela would remind her every now and then.

‘That it would,’ Kayal would reply wistfully, looking longingly at the very desirable inscription, and then gently pry the book out of her boss’s hands and slide it back into one of Neela’s many personal bookcases (housed in her swanky Besant Nagar beach-front apartment) that held, among other bibliophilic rarities, her exquisite private collection of association copies and signed firsts, including a presentation copy of Sir Vidia’s Shadow from Theroux to Naipaul, with a manuscript inscription on the front flyleaf that read, ‘To Vidia: A small tit for a large tat’.

‘Ah-ha!’ the priest suddenly exclaimed.

A discovery, perhaps, Kayal wondered, looking his way; one of those tiny eureka moments that every collector experiences with a find.

Smiling, she looked up from her catalogue…to see him glowering at her. He had an armload of books and his expression suggested that he could, at any moment, do something uncanonical with them. He brought the books over and carefully piled them on the desk. They were mostly late seventeeth-century and early eighteenth-century hymnals, liturgical prayer books and church manuals whose pages had foxed and binding loosened, giving off that musty whiff bibliophiles got high on – what Orwell had once referred to as ‘the sweet smell of decaying books’. Except for one volume in the lot, they were not valuable so much as out of print.

Kayal could see why these books would interest a clergyman, but now she had the task of having to tell him they were not for sale – at least, not just yet.

‘Reverend, I’m sorry,’ she began, ‘but these books haven’t been priced and catalogued yet.’

‘And why not?’ he asked with a mystifying smirk.

‘They need to be restored and, in some cases, even rebacked.’

‘Which is…?’

‘When the binding shows signs of becoming detached, we reback the book by having the spine remade. And when that doesn’t help we remove the original binding and replace it with a contemporary binding. It’s a lot of work, but we know a skilful bookbinder right here in Chennai who does a fine job of restoring books.’

‘I’m not here to buy these books, but to claim them back, Ms…?’

‘Kayalveli – Kayal. Claim them back?’

‘The books in question, Ms Kayal, are stolen property,’ declared the priest. ‘I’d like them returned to where they belong.’

‘And where’s that, Reverend Satya?’ asked Kayal, in a slightly sharper voice now.

‘The library at Heber Chapel in Madras Christian College. Look.’

He opened the books to their paste-down endpapers and pointed to the chapel seal which was clearly decipherable. ‘The gift of Bishop Heber, Heber Hall, MCC, Tambaram,’ it said.

‘I came here today because more than one faculty member has informed me that they’ve seen books belonging to the chapel library in your stock. Now I come here and discover that you have a shelf – a whole shelf – of all our very old library books here. I don’t understand what your interest in these books could be and how you came to possess them.’

‘Did you not deaccession these books some three months ago because they were taking up much-needed shelf space?’

He looked uncertain for a moment, then replied, ‘Our very devoted chapel librarian, Robert Arulpragasam – soon to retire after thirty years of faithful and dedicated librarianship – persuaded us that it might be the best course of action to make room for newer, more updated holdings and to clear our shelves of clutter. But the collection wasn’t thrown away. He asked if he could have the books – he was terribly attached to them, you see, having been their custodian for over three decades – and we gladly made a gift of them to him. And, might I add, that in deep appreciation of our gesture, our dear, venerable Arulpragasam gifted the library a bookcase full of beautiful leather-bound books from his personal collection. Each of them, no doubt, of considerable value.’

‘And in return you let him have these shabby old books?’

‘It’s the least we could do after he had replaced them with all those sumptuous-looking ones. He was deeply sentimental about these old books and offered to take them off our hands and look after them.’

‘So they are really his books, then. Wouldn’t that be correct, Reverend Satya?’

‘Indeed! And it now looks like someone has taken or stolen these books from him somehow, and sold them here!’

‘Not just someone, Reverend. The librarian himself.’

Momentarily stumped, Reverend Satya opened and shut his mouth a couple of times. Then, recovering, he said brightly, ‘Ah, I see now. Arulpragasam donated the lot to the bookshop, no doubt.’

‘No, not donated, Reverend. Sold. For quite a pretty sum too.’

‘But…but these are not valuable books! Th-they’re just very old.’

‘You’re right in assuming that most old books are not really valuable, as people often tend to believe. Their value is more sentimental than anything else. But once in a while some of these books do turn out to be that rare thing: Truly valuable and scarce editions of important books; books that continue to matter now. To a collector interested in antiquarian books, especially someone who collects hymnals and prayer books from this period, they would be invaluable. And, yes, in this lot that Arulpragasam sold us there are one or two fairly interesting editions.’

‘Then all I can say is that it seems to me our Arulpragasam was doubly generous! The leather-bound books that replaced these out-of-print editions must surely be worth more, perhaps even be valuable in the extreme.’

‘Can I come and see the leather-bounds myself?’ Kayal asked, her curiosity surfacing in spite of herself.

‘They are not for sale,’ the priest replied icily.

‘Biblio has no interest, I can assure you, in buying them. Reverend, will you sit down for a moment, please? There’s something I want to show you that may interest you. And then, perhaps, some things about this whole affair will become a little clearer to you.’

He nodded and took the chair by her desk.

‘Leather-bound books,’ said Kayal gently, ‘are pretty but most of the time their only value is decorative. With a few exceptions, they are not collected; I doubt the books Mr Arulpragasam donated so generously are worth anything in the antiquarian market. What is valued, plain though it may be, is a book in its original cloth binding, not one bound in decorative leather. And these books that he took away from the chapel library are all in their original binding and boards, not rebound in contemporary binding. Look at this one.’

She picked out the one item in the lot that was carefully wrapped and handed it to him.

He opened the book and exclaimed, ‘The Book of Common Prayer! But we have several more of these! It’s been the Anglican liturgical prayer book for centuries now.’

‘But I bet you don’t have very many copies as old as this one; my guess is, probably none whatsoever.’ She showed him the title page, pointing to the year of printing: 1662. ‘This is a fairly scarce, sought-after edition. It’s not often that you can turn up something printed in the seventeenth century here in India – and in this condition too. Your librarian must have known it would fetch something, because he sold it to us for a considerable sum.’

At first, the clergyman seemed silenced by this revelation, but then he spoke up again. ‘You did mention there were some exceptions to leather bindings that are the valuable sort…’

‘Those are bindings by bespoke designer binders such as Sangorski and Sutcliffe, Zaensdorf, Zahn, Middleton – custom-made for collectors, with gold tooling, gilt edges, marbled paper and raised bands in all kinds of sumptuous leather. I doubt if the bindings Arulpragasam donated are fine bindings, though I can’t be certain until I’ve seen them. In fact, it’s possible that they could be prize bindings.’

‘Prize bindings?’

‘It was quite common for well-endowed European and English schools to award their star pupil, say someone who had stood first in Latin, a well-known classic rebound in leather. Such custom binding was usually carried out by a local binder, and though many were quite attractively designed and bound, they are nevertheless, craftsmanship-wise, fairly standard, and nothing close to the work of the designer binders I’ve just mentioned.’

This time, the priest remained quiet and Kayal held her tongue, allowing him to work it out for himself.

When he finally spoke, he looked troubled, sad. ‘What you aren’t saying, Ms Kayal, is that apart from how valuable and rare these books are, they were the college chapel’s most prized treasure; something we ought to have carefully preserved instead of discarding.’

‘Yes, you should hold on to them. Recover them if you can.’

‘How do I do that now? We can’t ask for the books to be returned.’

‘I have an idea about how you can get them back,’ Kayal told him. ‘It involves paying a surprise visit to your dear Robert Arulpragasam and playing a little antiquarian trade trick on him. Give me a few weeks, Reverend Satya, and I’ll have something worked out.’

‘We have a month. Robert is on leave; on a trip, I believe, to his native place near Madurai. But please keep in mind that the librarian we are both referring to is not the librarian of the main college library, which has always been separate. Arulpragasam is the librarian for the small library at Heber Chapel. Here’s my phone number and address. I live on campus, of course.’

‘And Arulpragasam – is he on campus too?’

‘Yes, at least until the end of the next month. He’s retiring, as I mentioned, and has, apparently, already found a nice house in East Tambaram.’

Kayal saw Reverend Satya to the door, locked up for the night and stepped out of the bookshop.

Outside, it was hotter now, with only a mild trace of sea breeze in the wind. She hailed an auto and jumped in, yelling, ‘Alwarpet!’ She simply wasn’t in the mood tonight to haggle with the driver over the outrageous fare he would inevitably demand. She usually took the bus home, but it had been a long evening and her grandmother would be waiting up for her to begin dinner, no matter how late it got.

Amudha Paati was still puzzling over her granddaughter’s choice of career. She had imagined her granddaughter as a college professor with a cushy UGC salary and pension, so when Kayal had announced she was quitting academics for Biblio, Paati hadn’t known what to make of it.

‘But, kanna,’ Paati had argued, ‘there are so many shops around Moore Market hawking old books. Why must you do the same?’

‘Paati, those books are just second-hand, not antiquarian.’

‘You know, kanna, that’s exactly what they say about that famous roadside bookstall in Luz Corner. They say you can find all kinds of treasures there; once a lucky passer-by found a copy of Vairamuthu’s poems, signed and inscribed to Ilayaraja.’

This had given Kayal pause. ‘Well, that is a find. Hmm, wish I’d snapped that up… Makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it, how it got there?’



2



The Young Antiquarian

The next morning, Kayal caught the 23C bus to Besant Nagar. Neela wanted to see her about going on a little book-scouting trip for Biblio. Since Neela knew how much her associate enjoyed sitting on the balcony of her sixth-floor apartment that overlooked the beach, a pot of fresh-ground organic coffee by her side, she had asked Kayal to drop by for a leisurely chat. Pokisha, Neela’s neice, who clerked part-time at Biblio, had the morning desk at the bookshop, so Kayal wouldn’t have to be back until later.

Getting off at the stop before the bus terminus, Kayal made an important detour to the Murugan Idli Shop which served the best chutneys (five of them!) in Chennai on a plantain leaf, so you could wipe off every bit of them with soft, steaming idlis and crisp dosas. They served ghee pongal too and decent filter coffee, but those weren’t for a vegan like Kayal. Still, a satisfying breakfast at Murugan Idli needed to be followed up with some strong coffee and Neela’s hundred-per-cent single-origin Arabica dark roast, drunk black, was just the thing. A million times better than the milky, overly sweet degree coffee served in most Chennai restaurants.

It was only 9 a.m. and already the day was sticky with humidity. It seemed unseasonably hot for February. Neela’s apartment was at least half-a-kilometre away, but Kayal decided against taking an auto. She would take the path along the beach to make her walk a little more pleasant. For most of Kayal’s adolescent life, Chennai had simply been the city she had grown up in and she had chugged along like every other Chennaite, trying not to mind the blistering heat, the exasperating philistinism of her college mates and the comical worldliness of her relatives. The things that connected many a Chennaite to their city – food, music, Tamil cinema and festivals – had left her mostly unmoved. But in her last year of college at Stella Maris, the city had suddenly changed for her. Kayal had stumbled upon colonial Madras while on an impromptu heritage walk through the city, and had fallen swiftly under the spell of its English and Indian antiquaries.

Kayal liked reminding people that the origins of the East India Company had not been in Calcutta, nor in Bombay, nor Delhi, but right here in her city. The other Raj cities had been more deliberate enterprises, and could boast of the best examples of colonial architecture. But Madras was the first Indian city to establish and nourish the institutions the British would later became famous for: The first hospitals, the first schools and colleges, the first government, the first railways, the first churches, the first libraries – and the first bookshops. It was fascinating to think that Robert Clive had been here when he was just a teenager, a still unknown soldier trying to find his footing at Fort St George, then a small garrison town.

What captivated the blooming antiquarian in Kayal was not life in the city as the British knew it, but life in Madras, the first ‘modern’ city in India, as its original inhabitants must have experienced it. While there seemed to be, if not very much, at least sufficient sources that could tell her how the British had fared in her city, she found very little about how her own people must have felt about life in a burgeoning metropolis. To dig up more telling sources about the average Madrasian became Kayal’s new-found mission, focusing on the role Indians had played in the early establishment of libraries and bookshops in the country. Higginbotham’s, the oldest bookshop in India, was one of the starting points she’d considered. But just as Kayal was digging her teeth into the beginnings of Madras’s antiquarian book culture, her parents, both of whom worked in the railways as administrators, got transfer orders to Salem. It wa. . .