Fourteen or 15 years ago, my cousin and I rifled through the stacks of books on the floor of Broadway Book Centre in Panaji, the capital of...
Fourteen or 15 years ago, my cousin and I rifled through the stacks of books on the floor of Broadway Book Centre in Panaji, the capital of Goa, looking for the second instalment of a series whose debut we had grown obsessed with. We had been dropped off by whichever parent was saddled with chauffeuring and we had a couple of hours ahead of us before they’d arrive insisting we needed to leave immediately.
We hurriedly scoured the vast space where authors and genres and eras were muddled together to enable the sort of treasure hunt I can only now find in a second-hand bookstore or a guesthouse bookshelf outfitted with the discards of random, travelling strangers. We found our book in one of the piles, the second to last from the floor, and not a single other book from the series. I wouldn’t classify it as fate, but to two girls heavily invested in Ann Brasher’s The Sisterhood of The Travelling Pants, finding The Second Summer was the greatest piece of fun.
Broadway’s different now. As am I. Here to interview the man who allowed me and numerous others to read quietly in his space, I wander through the sections, better organised and labelled now....
