The flora & fauna of Crossword

Saturday afternoon at Crossword on Kemps Corner bang in the middle of summer vacations and what do you expect but harried adults entertaining trails of identikit kids dressed in Cotton World and Benetton discount surplus, loitering by the DVD counters; kids drooling over Hollywood’s canny summer offerings: Chicken Little, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Narinda, and King Kong! Kids dawdling by the comic book section; kids dreaming of Grandmother’s Apple Crumble, Black Bottom Pie, and Blue Berry Cheese cakes at Moshe’s deli counter on the first floor.

 

It seems like all of Mumbai’s kids that the Pied Piper has not whisked away have been herded to get their jollies at the bookshop and that’s finally made reading a lifestyle trend in Mumbai.

 

Of course, there are the usual suspects: bookish adults –sans kids- out for a Saturday afternoon of singular indulgence browsing at a bookstore.

 

Highbrow women who pore over the Margaret Atwoods and Manju Kapurs. Eng Lit majors who peruse CP Surendran An Iron Harvest. A lone Parsi (who else?) giggling to himself over Ogden Nash. An expat in black fatigues reading the Lonely Planet on Brazil. Two twenty year olds discussing Chetan Bhagat’s novels. Putative poets tentatively rifling through the Hoskotes and Moraes.

 

And then the usual army of grey people around the self help books, the business management tomes and the best sellers (Da Vinci Coders every one of them.)

 

Eavesdropping on conversations at the café on the first floor, the worst fears about what occupies the minds of well-heeled Mumbaikars are confirmed: food, fashion, cosmetic surgery, astrology, love( and the lack of it), travel, and designer brands are the topics of the day.

 

Pairs of women sit in conspiratorial comfort over croissants, measuring out their lives in coffee spoons.

 

Clutches of older couples, their plots behind them sip cups of Assam, Nilgiri and Orange Pekoe, while younger courting lovers, who seem to have stepped out of the pages of romance adventures, choose from the Jamaican, Colombian and Java coffees on offer.

 

Make no mistake, tomorrow this crowd will go bowling, or to a mutliplex or to an Italian café in its neighbourhood.

 

But today they are at this fashionable bookstore, turning one more page, one more day, and one more passage to the next chapter in the story of Mumbai.