The Zahir

The Zahir

Zahir is the name of a book by Paulo Coelho . I read it years back but thoroughly enjoyed it. Zahir means “obsession” . The book is about a writer who is obsessed with his wife who just disappears one day. We all have our zahirs from time to time. I had one yesterday.

I don’t remember when I came across this book – “Two states” by Chetan Bhagat. I read some reviews about it and felt a great connection to the female lead. Actually I have always felt a strong resemblance to the female leads of his books – One night, 5 Point and so on. It is probably a very common story, but it would the first book of Chetan I would read after coming to US. One thing greatly refreshing about his stories is the fact that his stories are based in India.

From the time I saw this, I really wanted to read it. I went to an old bookstore near my work place to find it. One had to search through the numerous piles of old books (They do not have a database where you can search through – they sell books for $1). The best thing about New York is you can choose to spend $1 to $100 on anything you want. It is Mumbai – magnified 10,000 times. Mumbai has always been my favorite place and so will New York be. So I searched for this book and ended up spending about 1 hour and got a book I remotely wanted. The woman at the counter asked me “Did you find everything all right?”. I told her I was looking for a specific book. She replied, “We have a big sale on 14th of August and you could probably find the book you want”. All I could do was just sigh. I caught a subway back home and on my way back to the dorm, looked at every bookstore.

I got back home, made myself some tea and set out again. I found another bookstore that sold books for $2. I scanned through all the books and finally the guy at the bookstore suggested I could probably find the book in “Strand “. It turned out to be a really big bookstore with all kinds of books. (About 5 times as big as Barnes and Nobles). Luckily they had a database, a guy at the counter looked through and said he didn’t have any books of Chetan.

I thought I had come this far and could to buy something. My eyes caught on to something “Bhagavath Gita –as it is “. The price on it was unbelievable – 50 cents. They say good things in life come for free, but probably the best thing in life comes at 50 cents.

I came back home and ordered “Two states” for $8 on Amazon