Bibliofile

Salman Rushdie, however, is unlikely to liven up our literary season this year—unless he makes one of his impromptu surprise visits like he did last year for William Dalrymple's reading in Delhi's largest—and disappointingly, most unindividual—bookstore.

A small book coffeetabler, Delhi—Light, Shades, Shadows by photographer D.N. Chaudhuri gives a vivid picture of what life was like being raised by his famously eccentric father, Nirad Chaudhuri: on March 31, 1942, Nirad Babu's family alighted at Delhi railway station to join their father who was working in the All India Radio. Their luggage included besides the usual suitcases, trunks, hold-alls, tiffin carriers, thermos flasks, Nirad's record collection, a hand-wound gramophone and a Mona Lisa reproduction. Inside one of the battered suitcases, his son reminisces, was a shiny box camera with which Chaudhuri Jr (schooled at home like his brothers by Nirad Babu) worked until he joined the government as a photographer.