A Chance Meeting (2)

My favorite bookstore is closing shop, at least at the market where it used to house the store, albeit at different addresses over time. Its last day of being open is this weekend and having not been able to go for some time, I decided today to be the day to visit, to hoard books and to sit at the café on its rooftop one last time enjoying my coffee. As I entered the store, it  had more people than I am accustomed to, possibly cause of the upcoming last day of the store and I was glad to see that its patrons were coming out of way to say goodbye to the store. After browsing about and finding the too many people (well there were two more gentleman in the store and that was too many for me), I picked up four books and went up to the counter. I found that one of the two gentleman was also at the counter and we ended up exchanging some pleasantries. He bid me and on my prompting the store a good day and went away. I stayed back to request the counter to gift wrap my books as I decided that I will treat them as gifts for myself in the future in memory of the bookstore. The salesman at the counter were happy to gift them complimentary for me and I decided to head to the café while the books were being gift wrapped.

I walked up the flight of stairs and saw my favorite table empty and parked my bag and turned around to greet the staff and found the gentleman from below sitting on the next table. He invited me to join him and I decided to do so. It was a pleasant 1 hour chat with Mr. Kapil Malhotra, in the publishing business under the brand Vision Books and our conversations jumped from what he bought to the reason people come to cafés to the general beauty of the winter morning to the interpretation of gita and the vedas to time being a being to book recommendations and gifting to ashok bunker and to a little life to him living at sainik farms with a view similar to the turtle café’s balcony to his favorite Indian authors – Raja Rao, mulk raj anand and RK Narayan to his age (one month younger/older than the current PM) to his grand kids to reading books to his father’s discourse on gita and his wife’s interest.

Such wealth of conversation. And such a delight to finally, after all these years, bump into a fellow reader at the café which I have visited for so long. I was talking about this with raashi, that what we want in life, we do get eventually, just not in the manner we thought we would get it. lo and behold, I finally found a friend at a book store café who I could share a brilliant conversation over a cup of coffee.

Blessed today :)