Daryaganj on Sunday is a reader's delight. And you will know if you happen to be in Delhi, a city that has over the years turned into one of the most significant of capitals in the world. There is an amplitude of history that you associate with Delhi, and for all the right reasons in the world. In Daryaganj, it is history you discover through all those multitudes of books spread all across the pavement, from one end of it to the other all that distance away.
Books constitute a world, always. As Charles de Gaulle once remarked, upon being asked what or who had influenced him the most in life, “Do not ask a lion how many lambs it has eaten. I have read books all my life.” That, ladies and gentlemen, is the music which keeps ringing in the hearts of those for whom books are not merely a source of pure joy but are a passion they cannot live without.

It was joy and passion that led me to Daryaganj, yet once again, last week. I did expect new treasure. And I did come across treasure. Since history is one subject that fascinates me and so many others of my generation, it was history I was in search of. And there, stacked among so many books on a diversity of subjects, was Lahore 1947. With an introduction by Ian Talbot and edited by Ahmad Salim, it was a work I could not let go of. And, voila! It was soon mine, for a tidy sum of eighty rupees.

I moved on, from one bookseller to another, till my eyes spotted Alistair Horne's Kissinger 1973: The Crucial Year. Now, there is something about Kissinger that draws you to the man. You may love him, you may hate him. But you surely cannot be indifferent to him. His is a personality that brims over with knowledge of geopolitics and so it was that I collected that book on the pavement, before stepping away happily, avoiding the earnest entreaties of the bookseller to take a look at some other books. I would not do that, for a little further away, it was Nigel Hamilton's American Caesars: Lives of the US Presidents (from FDR to George W. Bush) that beckoned, seductively. The young man looking after the bunch of tomes before him would not part with the object of my temptation for anything less than two hundred rupees.

I walked away and then came back a few minutes later, to find another, slightly older, person manning the books. He was ready to give me the book for a hundred and fifty rupees. I was happy. Three books in hand, I wondered how I could divest myself of the remaining Indian currency I had on me. Well, soon enough, some of it went into paying for a copy of John Man's The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan.
If Daryaganj in Delhi is a delight, Kolkata is pure ecstasy for bibliophiles. Whether you are at Oxford Bookstore on Park Street or Crossword on Elgin Road, you wish for two things: that the day would never end and that you had all the money in the world to buy up all those books and bring them home. But there are other places in Kolkata as well, perfect spots where you can be sure of bumping into desirable and eminently readable books. At such a shop outside New Market last month, as I caressed a biography of Meena Kumari by the journalist Vinod Mehta, I noticed that new work on the 1965 India-Pakistan war by Farooq Bajwa, From Kutch to Tashkent: The Indo-Pak War of 1965. The shop owner, whom I first met way back in 1987 when my wife took me on a visit to her city a few years into our marriage, was still around and cheerfully let me have these two books, besides pointing out some others that I was not quite inclined to buy.

If it is truly good books you need to read and then preserve in your library, try not to miss the annual Kolkata Book Fair at the Milan Mela grounds. In early February this year, once I had gone through the formalities of the launch of my biography of Bangabandhu (From Rebel to Founding Father: Sheikh Mujibur Rahman) at the fair, I took a stroll with our wonderful friend Jawed and, rather suddenly and unexpectedly, found myself before a stall dealing in old, rare books. It did not take me long to get hold of a few, but in that clutch of books, it was especially a 1927 edition of Prithwis Chandra Ray's Life and Times of C.R. Das that gladdened the soul. It is quite unusual for one to come by such an old edition. Das died in 1925 and two years later it was for Ray, who knew Deshbandhu, to come forth with this biography. The style is fast-paced. It does not bore you. You keep reading till slumber comes to you, at dawn.

At Netaji International Airport in Kolkata, within the precincts of the departure lounge, there is the traveller's shoppe where loads of new books are a positive temptation for you. Much as you keep telling yourself that you will refrain from buying any more new book, because your bags are loaded already with the works you have been purchasing over the past few days, you realize at some point that you are in that kowtow position --- it would be outrageous boarding that flight back home without a souvenir from that shop. In February, one of the works that fell into my hands, at Netaji, was the Rakhshanda Jalil-edited New Urdu Writings from India and Pakistan. For good measure, I thought it would be a marvellous idea to have Krishna Dutta's Calcutta: a cultural and literary history, come along with me. Both works rekindle in you thoughts of the periodic stages of renaissance in the home we know as South Asia. And, of course, Calcutta or Kolkata is always part of our Bengali historical consciousness.

Last week, at traveller's shoppe, it was Inder Malhotra's Indira Gandhi: A Personal and Political Biography that I could not resist lapping up, for the late Indian prime minister was a leader in the truest sense of the meaning, despite all her evident flaws. My pockets still tingling with Indian currency, I decided that getting hold of Khushwant Singh's Why I Supported the Emergency (a collection of essays by the indefatigable sardar) would not be a bad bargain. The soft-spoken, bespectacled young Bengali woman (I would have loved to have her as a daughter) was thrilled as my hands reached out to some other books, Tibet: A History, by Sam van Schaik, for instance.
As one cruises into one's sixties, it is sometimes permissible to be naughty. Thoughts of wickedness crowding my mind and old-fashioned thoughts of romance flooding my heart, I seized copies of two works, one of them being Close, Too Close: The Tranquebar Book of Queer Erotica (edited by Meena and Shruti).

In Delhi last October, life was enriched a little through the purchase of Ali Jawad Zaidi's A History of Urdu Literature at a small bookshop near Connaught Place. In February this year, as I needed the minutes to tick away before calling on Kiran Agarwala, a dear friend of my wife Zakia and mine, at Mirza Ghalib Street (formerly Free School Street) in Kolkata, I walked into a bookshop dealing in old volumes right opposite her home. I found Robert D. Kaplan's Monsoon there.
It's time now to go into a bit of reading. There's the mug of warm coffee before you, on that table bulging with books. Pick one, indeed pick more than one. And read. Read on, till one more twilight comes to your window, to whisper into your ears that life slowly draws to an end.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is with The Daily Star