Where are the snows of yesteryear
Way back in the Fifties, my favourite haunt for old books was Kumar's, off Lower Circular Road near the Jora Girja. The owner Nirmal Kumar, was a book-lover himself, to whom profit-making was secondary. His establishment was a large ground floor room and another smaller ad-joining room in his house. "Book lined Den" is a phrase that we often come across. Kumar's shop was an ideal version of it. The four walls were lined with books, from floor to ceiling. And what books! Numerous volumes on Indology and on all conceivable subjects of Anglo-Indiana, all rare, some excessively so. Beautiful books, bound in vellum, often gold-tooled under the loving care and attention of their former owners whose book-plates served as an extra adornment. With pardonable exaggeration one can say that the four walls represented an acre of vellum with the glint of old gold. The smaller room contained tall folios of aquatints, engravings and lithographs by British and European masters such as Hodges, the Daniels, Solvyns, Fraser, Doyly, Emily Eden and others. And prices! I will just give a few examples. Fanny Parks: Wandering in the Zenana in Search of the Picturesque, in two large volumes, could be had for a mere Rs 500. The book, practically un-obtainable, would now cost thousands. Oriental Scenery, comprising 144 plates, in six volumes was on sale for something between Rs 4,000 and Rs 5,000 in the early Sixties. At the moment wealthy collectors will vie with one another to acquire such a set for several lakhs of rupees. I spent day after day, hour upon hour, handling and browsing through those beautiful volumes. Kumar died some years ago. In the last years, he had sold many of his books. After his death, almost all were gone except a few which stood like mute mistresses of a golden period. And then one day it was my last visit, to Kumars. As I was coming back, I could not help muttering to myself: "Oh! Where are the snows of yesteryear?"